

7 Reasons Why My Social Music Site Never Took Off - dmix
http://dmix.ca/2008/06/7-reasons-why-my-social-music-site-never-took-off/

======
webwright
"Bad launch, the launch of the site wasn’t planned very well at all. I decided
to use the “genius” marketing ploy of having a private beta to create
scarcity."

What percentage of great/enviable web startups had a GREAT launch? I'm not
saying a good launch isn't valuable, but it doesn't merit being on a list of
top reasons you failed.

Read this: [http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/06/not-so-
grand...](http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/06/not-so-grand.html)

------
petuniapredator
A good read dmix but do not despair. Only a very few startups ever get any
traction and you have done a nice job of identifying some of the reasons.

The nice thing about software startups is that no matter how unsuccessful a
business model or product introduction might be you have expanded your
personal code base and increased your marketability to potential clients (e.g.
now you will be able to charge $200 an hour instead of $100)..

------
tialys
I find it inspiring that you managed to get this up and running as well as you
did while in college. Keep trying and I'm sure you'll go far.

------
dmoney
> He called at about 11pm

That seems late for a phone call to somebody you don't know. Or is it assumed
in the startup world that everybody is a night owl?

~~~
dmix
Yeah, he was calling from California on the west coast and we were in Toronto
on the east. I think it's about a 4 hr difference.

------
maxklein
Did you consider that your site may have failed because it uses a black
background? How many very successful websites do you know that use black
backgrounds?

------
omouse
About the Cold Start problem...couldn't you have written a bot to crawl the
web looking for random albums? There are quite a few mp3/music blogs. Or
another interesting idea would be to scan Last.fm and see what's going up the
charts.

Anyway, great post :D

------
wumi
_"We were offering information on great albums and community voting. But other
sites like Last.fm and Hype Machine were offering the actual music"_

Hard to have a music site without actual music. My $.02. Good insight though,
thanks for sharing.

------
BrandonM
Interesting story. If the cofounder couldn't contribute much on the technical
end, it seems like he should've been more involved in finding new material for
the site. But then you said that he didn't like indie music much. So why was
he your cofounder again?

~~~
Goronmon
I think that was the gist behind the "Niche Social Networks are not
Businesses" section near the end. His friend was brought on as a cofounder
because he believed that business knowledge would be important. He learned
that, at least in his case, having a "business knowledge" person was not very
helpful in getting the site off the ground.

------
tstegart
I love the part about the phone call. That's the sort of thing you can look
back on and laugh, but at the time it probably seemed like a huge deal. At
least its something you can learn from next time, and thats a good thing.

------
migpwr
Good stuff:

Niche Social Networks are not Businesses

~~~
sanj
They aren't?

<http://howardforums.com/> <http://www.gaiaonline.com/>
<http://www.ytmnd.com/>

From: <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/meganiche_pr.html>

~~~
subwindow
Businesses can be made from niches. Niche business can have social networks.
However, niche social networks are not businesses.

You see which way it flows? With a niche business, the social network is a
subset of the functionality if it exists at all. If it is _just_ a niche
social network, it probably is not a business.

~~~
astine
I don't know, a social network can be made into a business, but one has to
treat it as a social network, before it becomes a business.

Once the social network qua social network is healthy, you can then monetize
it. It's a lot of work, and the financial rewards are little, but if you do it
right, you can get a strong and loyal user base and maybe make a few friends.

~~~
jfornear
Facebook started out as a niche social network for Ivy League students.

~~~
jonknee
And technically it's still losing money hand over fist. But I'm with you, I
think niche social networks have more money making potential actually. Linked
In is a good example, they have been profitable for a while.

~~~
fbailey
People who work is not really a niche

~~~
jfornear
People who work AND network online is a niche I would say.

------
vaksel
you know people always talk about "our site was not ready for TC", but has
anyone ever posted what kind of infrastructure you actually need to be ready
for all that traffic?

~~~
subwindow
I think his technical infrastructure was ready for it, but his marketing
infrastructure was not ready to take full advantage of it.

I've been TC'd once before, and it hit us at the worst possible time- a
temporary banner was up for the hours before launch. That banner got more
attention in the article than the service. The site held up fine, but >80% of
the traffic was wasted. I think this is a pretty common phenomena.

~~~
vaksel
what were your server(s) specs?

~~~
emmett
TechCrunch really just doesn't send that much traffic.

If you can do 50 reqs/second you will be absolutely fine; it doesn't take any
kind of special server.

~~~
modoc
Ditto. I handled hitting the front page of /., digg, and yahoo tech on the
same day on a single dual core server. The site slowed down a little during
the worst of it, but page load times were always reasonable. Unless your app
is a total beast and/or you require a large amount of resources to service
each user, a single server is probably fine.

