
Rejected Y Combinator company Bandsintown.com is now Live! - knewjax
http://www.bandsintown.com/
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brianmckenzie
Hey, I like this! Every so often I'm like _"Gee, haven't been to a show
lately, I wish there were some band I've heard of playing around here"_. So I
have to find some indie newspaper to look up who is in town, but a homeless
guy took them all out of the rack and is trying to sell them, and I don't want
to look on all the clubs' websites so I give up. Not anymore.

Thanks,

Rejected Jessica Alba suitor Brian McKenzie

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danielha
Cool, I like it -- it immediately delivers on what I expected it would do. I'm
not sure what the tag cloud significance is, however. Are the larger displayed
bands more popular in searches?

By the way, I'm not sure why saying "Rejected YC company" is of any value. I
don't introduce myself as "Stanford rejected person, Daniel Ha".

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nostrademons
I kinda like having announcements tagged as "Rejected YC company", because it
gives people considering YC funding a baseline to measure the actual benefits
of the program itself, as opposed to the quality of the applicants.

Looking at YC-funded companies, I know that they've created pretty impressive
stuff. But I have no way of knowing whether they are just kickass hackers who
would've created great companies anyway, or whether they _became_ great
hackers because of the mentorship of PG et al. There's a selection-bias: the
fact that they beat out 400 or so other applicants indicates they were pretty
cream-of-the-crop anyway.

By seeing the outcomes of rejected YC companies, we can say "Okay, these folks
are drawn from the same pool of applicants, and at least in YCombinator's
estimation, they were _less_ promising. Let's see what their success rate is
compared to the ones that YC eventually did invest in."

There's still a survivorship bias, because people who were rejected, tried
anyway, and then crashed and burned are unlikely to post on news.YC with their
postmortems (though I'd absolutely love to see some). But at least it'd give a
control group of people who were just as motivated and came from the same
applicant population, to compare with the outcomes of those selected for the
program itself. Right now, we just have PG's assurance that they roughly
double the expected outcome for a startup, with little data to back it up.

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knewjax
I agree 100%.

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adnam
I just had a peek and found out that my favourite band is making a rare
european tour and is soon playing just a mile from my front door. So rare,
infact, that I don't even usually bother to check their tour dates. Anyway, I
just spent $100 on a pair of tickets - shame that bandsintown didn't get a
penny.

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brezina
Hi guys, I like this a lot. Quick feedback:

It isn't immediately obvious how to change my location. However, once I found
out that you just click on the city name you detected my entry very well.

Like others, I'm wondering what makes a band's name appear more prominent in
the tag cloud. I clicked on the largest name for my area.

I don't know why indy vs label delineation is broken out in detail, but genre
is not. Maybe you should show five genres which users can click on as examples
before entering their own.

You guys found me a show: terance blanchard at Yoshi's in Oakland. Thanks a
lot!

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knewjax
We will improve the ability to edit the location, Especially for users who are
signed up and just want to check out other areas, without changing their
account settings.

And as far as the sizing, it is based on overall popularity when you are not
logged in. When you sign up and add favorite artists it begins to personalize
itself to your taste in music.

Hopefully this makes the site useful to everyone, but VERY VERY useful once
you signup and begin to add your favorite artists.

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mynameishere
Don't know much much about tag clouds, so excuse my ignorance: But, has this
basic idea been done before, except with things other than bands?

The reason I ask: My first impression was very strongly, "This is a neat tool,
but why would they limit themselves to bands?". You could do this with
ANYTHING...but with branding like "bandsintown" your potential market is 0.01
percent of what it could be. I strongly recommend getting a generic name (like
myspace) and then:

1) Allow different product categories (Nearest coffeeshop, nearest book store
that sells a certain book, nearest movie theatre playing a certain movie at
certain hours, etc).

2) Allow different views of your model. Tag clouds strike me as a flash in the
pan. Allow charts, bar graphs, pies, etc, etc.

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davidw
"You could do this with ANYTHING"

I think the answer to that lies in the idea of "focus". Trying to do too much
leads either to not being very good at any of it, or worse, architecture
astronaut trips into the stratosphere of making things ever more generic and
able to handle all kinds of data and odd cases.

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mynameishere
I guess my problem is that the name prevents any expansion later on, unlike
the example myspace (which started out aimed at bands).

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knewjax
Yeah we do see the ability for expansion as well. Under another brand of
course because you are right we do limit ourselves with our stratedgy.

The reason i do not use eventful and tools like that is because of the lack of
focus. I know with bandsintown that I will be discovering new local shows and
nothing else. This was our primary goal.

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mynameishere
Okay, one last suggestion. The domain zintown.com is available. Thus:

band.zintown.com movie.zintown.com

(intown.com and other better variations were already taken.)

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knewjax
Thats awesome. Thanks, We own a few more ___intown domains as well, but i like
this idea a lot.

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staunch
I think he's totally wrong and what davidw said about focus is right on. It's
easy to generalize any idea, but most of the time it just leads to mediocrity.
Force the expansion out of your mind until you've completely dominated your
current target. By then you'll probably see much better ways to expand than
this obvious generalization.

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knewjax
Thank you for the input staunch. I def agree with everything you said. I also
think its good to set goals for yourself and think well into the future, even
though most of your original ideas and plans will end up far from where you
had anticipated.

"Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of
possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning."

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jsjenkins168
Your interface rocks. Its instantly usable right when you visit the site. Took
me just a few seconds and I had it figured out. Living in a very live music-
oriented city I find this tool very useful.

I've just passed it on to a few friends here and their reactions are similar.
Keep up the good work.

My only complaint is that I'm personally not a fan of tag clouds. May want to
consider evolving the bands list into something more eye catching and
readable. I also agree that you should consider modifying the name early so
that you are better setup to expand into areas other than bands.

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weel
Whatever you use to automatically determine my location doesn't quite get it
right; it thinks that I am in a small town that I vaguely recall as not being
that far away from where I now live, so it's not the biggest deal.

Also, you may want to set distances to metric for people in countries where
that's the standard. It's not at all impossible to get some users in e.g.
Northern European countries without translating into the local language, but
the size of a mile is not something people around here tend to be familiar
with.

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knewjax
Yes for sure, we know we still have to do some distance and monetary
conversions for outside the US. We will get there!

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sillydude
This site is very well designed and a great idea. Good work!

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adaptable
I just signed up and played with it for a few minutes... so far I'm very happy
with the concept. I'm glad they went ahead with the idea on their own.

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gyro_robo
Congrats! You even auto-detect location via IP, and have maps and expanded
info. Slick. This site is easily better than many YC-funded ones.

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paul
Pretty cool, but the randomly sized band names could use some work. For
example, "the police" should probably be in a font large enough to me to read
without squinting.

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knewjax
Hi Paul, The Police is probably smaller on your screen because out of the
favorite artists youve added we have not picked up on a similar relationship.
If you add the police as a favorite artist, or a bands similar to them, they
will grow in size. The Site is built to compliment your musical taste so the
tagcloud is not completely based on overall popularity.

for instance the police are very large on my tag cloud.
<http://www.bandsintown.com/user/knewjax/>

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dallasrpi
I was thinking about doing this exact same concept! Definitely fills a niche
of something I was looking for and very well done. Good work.

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SwellJoe
Fantastic UI. I wouldn't use it for a "real" app, but for fun stuff, it's
awesome and fun to play with.

Best of luck!

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edawerd
I really dig the UI. Very clean looking. Nice job! What libraries are you
using?

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SwellJoe
Hint: Click "View" in your browser menu, and the click "Page Source". Right at
the top there's a list of libraries. ;-)

Looks like Prototype plus several of Prototype extensions, plus some other
random stuff--probably a few custom libs given the filenames.

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kingnothing
What's the big, mostly blank, turquoise box in the middle for?

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knewjax
Hi, Where are you located? My guess is there are no shows in you area or you
have the time frame set to small. Try expanding your time frame, choose to
show unsigned artists, and extend the distance.

this is an example of my homepage for Boston, MA with my preferences.
<http://www.bandsintown.com/user/knewjax>

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kingnothing
I'm in Auburn, AL. There's a few shows listed here, but not much.

The problem I always saw with trying to start something like this is providing
all the info about local shows and small bands that are likely only listed on
bar and club web pages -- did you guys find some way to get around that?

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knewjax
We'll we allow anyone to post shows. So we are hoping that as we grow,
dedicated fans, the artists themselves, or the venues will add their schedules
to keep things up to date.

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far33d
sonicliving.com

~~~
trajan
FWIW, I like bandsintown a lot more at first glance. I didn't have to click
anything, and I instantly found out a lot about what's going in my area.

It looked like I had 5 or 10 more clicks at least to get anything good out of
sonicliving. I'll probably never go there again unless someone I trust
strongly recommends it. I'm sure I'll idly pop into bandsintown a few more
times over the next few months.

