

Ask HN: Traction, but no scalability, nor revenue model - resdirector

I recently restored The Technicolor Web Of Sound, a fantastic 60s psychedelic radio station that went offline in 2011: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tunein.com&#x2F;radio&#x2F;Technicolor-Web-Of-Sound-Redux-s223835&#x2F;.<p>It has 25 followers, regular listeners, and one evangelist.<p>However, this not really a &quot;startup&quot; business with rapid scalability nor revenue model.<p>That said, it has the beginnings of traction (listeners, growth, passionate reception). Having tried two startups previously, I appreciate just how difficult and rare it is to get even a small amount of traction.<p>My question is, should I continue to pump time and energy into this at the expense of some of my other side-projects, some of which I believe to be far more lucrative, but without traction yet.<p>In other words, I&#x27;ve (re)built something that a few people absolutely love. And if I understand pg and others writings, this is an incredibly important first step in building a successful business.<p>Perhaps the best strategy is to just have faith that I will eventually hit upon an idea to generate revenue and make it scalable to large numbers of people.<p>E.g. one idea might be to take the best ideas behind TWOS redux and apply it to a plethora of other music genres. Make a large number of very good radio stations, think soma.fm.
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steven2012
Does anyone on HN do anything because they actually have a passion for
something regardless of its profitability, or is the horrible stereotype of
doing whatever makes a nickel every 1000 clicks really true?

If you care about the radio station and have a passion for it, continue. If
you're only in it to make a buck, then just forget about it. The last thing
people want to read is "Sorry, I'm going to be closing this because it didn't
get the traction I needed. But this journey gave me a great learning
experience, so keep watching this space for my next startup!"

~~~
anthony_franco
I think passion projects are fairly common. This one has been on the front
page all day:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8085213](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8085213)

Seven years of dedication and hasn't made a penny.

You can easily find many more examples. It all depends on the circumstances of
the person and whether they're in a position financially to dedicate their
free time to a project.

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wiseleo
It's a hobby. It seems you are falling into the trap of vanity metrics when
paying attention to number of followers.

Let's say you had 10000 followers who each listen for 2 hours per day, how
would you make money?

By the way, I still pay for [http://www.di.fm](http://www.di.fm) and have been
listening for many years. I pay them $7 per month. I can stop, but I like
their playlists and know that whenever I want to code with good background I
can trust their music selection to be productive.

Internet radio is bandwidth intensive, which tends to eat profits. I would
work on something else where you are more likely to make money in the near
term.

You can always run this as a hobby to recharge your mind while taking a break
from coding your other projects.

~~~
jewel
> Internet radio is bandwidth intensive, which tends to eat profits. I would
> work on something else where you are more likely to make money in the near
> term.

Out of curiosity, I ran the numbers. 10k users at 96 kbps for two hours a day
would consume 315 TB/year.

On AWS, that would cost you $246k/yr, just for the bandwidth. However, if you
use a dedicated hosting like 100TB, you can get the cost down quite a bit
lower. I think you'd need four of their servers at $215/mo each, which comes
to $10k/yr. (Note that a single gigabit port has enough bandwidth to serve
nearly all 10k listeners concurrently by itself, so four servers would cover
peak usage.)

There will be other costs, of course, such as licensing. The yearly cost is
potentially low enough that advertising could cover it. Also, a $5/mo premium
account would generate enough revenue to cover another 30-60 free users.

A related thought: Internet radio is an ideal application for peer-to-peer
distribution, since even a low-end DSL connection can support several other
peers. It can also tolerate dozens of seconds of latency. If each listener is
capable of supporting two more listeners on average, you'd be able to run the
radio station from your home internet connection without any permanent
infrastructure.

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resdirector
Thanks for all the replies, everyone, and sorry for the late response. Every
reply here has been very helpful.

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hashtag
I can't answer you directly but if I were in your shoes, I would ask myself
what I would want to accomplish from this. If the answer is something vague
like grow it into a sustainable business with more users, then it's probably
not the right one to pursue (for me in my own opinion).

Every idea with intent of becoming a business has the goal of growing and
being sustainable. That's too vague. I would prefer to work on ideas that I
care deeply about because those are ideas I enjoy the most and if that is
true, there is often a more in-depth goal of where I wish the idea or project
to be headed even if I don't necessarily have all the details or answers
mapped out.

If you don't have an answer like this in mind, at best my suggestion is to
keep thinking until something feels right.

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iaw
I listen to Chris Hardwick's Nerdist podcast. One of the things he points out
about his career in show business, is that he didn't become truly happy with
it and accomplish his goals until he started doing what he had a passion
about.

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resdirector
Clickable: [http://tunein.com/radio/Technicolor-Web-Of-Sound-
Redux-s2238...](http://tunein.com/radio/Technicolor-Web-Of-Sound-
Redux-s223835/)

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pbreit
I had trouble following your writing but would suggest that you need at least
10,000 audio listeners of something before even considering it side income.

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sixQuarks
sorry, but 25 followers is nowhere close to "traction". I would say traction
in this case is at least 1,000 followers.

