Check out http://headliner.fm. Marketplace for musicians to promote each other and grow their respective fan bases through social media. Seems like a win-win for both of you and you'll gain a revenue model.
I have 404,772 users. Now what?
101–110 of 198 posts
Re: I have 404,772 users. Now what?
#102Pud - when I look at your site, I see a marketplace for video music lessons. A tonne of people would pay $1.99 to learn a Radiohead song on piano, or get that perfect 'wub wub' sound in Reason. There's similar stuff on YouTube, but it's low quality and unreliable, and discovery is hard. Create a marketplace and you'll attract the best of the best. Prerecorded video would be perfect at first, but you could happily exp…
That's a good idea. There are people on Fandalism who are unbelievably good musicians, better than pros. I should ask them to do online lessons or whatnot. (of course, just because they're a good musician doesn't mean they're a good teacher. but i could come up with guidelines to help them teach..)
That would be really interesting. Khan Academy for music lessons, except it would also be a marketplace, and maybe live video could be part of it.
I could imagine that all recorded videos and tutorials and stuff could be free, because of the community nature of your site, but it also provides 'advertising' if people want to also be teachers. Then you just provide an easy way to do video chats for classes, for cash, and that's where you collect a percentage. This is pretty easy with Google Hangouts, and there are other APIs one can use too.
This way you get to monetize the site without putting up paywalls, or changing the community ethos of the site. I think everyone understands that people deserve to be paid for their time.
That might really work. Every musician has a few tricks up their sleeve. And there are other categories like producer, sound guy, etc, where tricks of the trade are learned only if you're part of a scene somewhere. If you're a kid in your bedroom in suburban Idaho maybe you can get your parents to cough up some dough for some online lessons on how to be a DJ.
Re: I have 404,772 users. Now what?
#103Going through all the comments, there are some great ideas. We are bulding a community website for entrepreneurs/startups and could probably use some of these ideas ourselves.
Here are a few more:
- Allow musicians to offer "live" concerts to their fans or to a worldwide audience, using the free Google+ hangouts or air feature. I think they just released an API. The most popular ones can be sponsored or you could just run ads on the Youtube videos and share revenues with the musicians.
- Setup a buy/sell section on the site (or on a separate subdomain or website) for used music instruments, accessories, books, sheet music etc. and either charge a small fee for listing or a transaction fee. If you don't want to run an ecommerce site, just let them list their stuff on Ebay or Amazon, but allow links to it from their profiles. These could be affiliate links and you could split the revenues with them (with full disclosure on the site).
- Have targeted email newsletters, for different interest areas. Sell advertising within the newsletters (it won't clutter your site).
Re: I have 404,772 users. Now what?
#104FYI here's a presentation of Pud's that I was listening to just by coincidence earlier this evening: http://www.siliconprairienews.com/2011/08/big-omaha-video-se...
Also heard Pud speak at the Open CF Summit http://opencfsummit.org/ in February but I don't think that talk is online yet.
Re: I have 404,772 users. Now what?
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is probably the correct answer (focus 100% on improving the product). The product is at a state where people like the idea of it so they sign up en masse -- but I'm not sure the site lives up to the expectation yet.
Focus on engagement . Sign ups are almost meaningless if the users bounce and never return. The reason Facebook is so amazing is not just that they have a billion users, it's that they have 80% of them checking the site 5x per week (or whatever). See how many users you can get into the habit of coming back to your site on a regular basis. That's the number that ultimately will drive everything: revenue, long term net…
'Engagement' is overrated. Some sites , e.g Google and Wikipedia probably have super high bounce rates, because they solve your problem on the first page you see. What if people start entering his site mainly from band pages, get all the necessary info and leave? That wouldn't be a bad thing for users.
Re: I have 404,772 users. Now what?
#106Wow - great site!
You have built up a large userbase that is current free for users? I think that charging a fee for these users and for the app would not be a smart move.
However what about adding some paid features - like fee for promoting a profile to the front page, premium profile page (blog, sell tickets to gigs).
What is often overlooked is deals with corporates. Is there anyway to tie into promotional deals with companies? eg Fandalism members get discounts to gigs promoted by x event organiser? Corporate pays you a fee.
What do your current members say? How would they want the site to make money to keep it going?
Good luck - great result.
Re: I have 404,772 users. Now what?
#107so how did he go from 0 to half a million users in three months? or is this just another rockstar founder effect?
Re: I have 404,772 users. Now what?
#108Or what about... Making a Pandora like music player to discover new music from profiles on your site? You can throw ads all over that, and maybe charge a couple of bucks? Plus have musician eCommerce so people can buy stuff they like. So I say I like "Nirvana" and your player matches me to undiscovered artists that are similar? I LOVE discovering new music.
I like this idea. People probably have never heard of the artists on your site, but I'm sure there is some incredible talent there already. If you could create a service for listeners, I think you could attract a lot of music fans. And hipsters.
People expect to hear ads in radio streams, as they have been conditioned by Pandora, Spotify, etc.
Re: I have 404,772 users. Now what?
#109Pud, don't forget there are 2 sides to profit. Income and costs. Monetisation is important and there have been loads of ideas here. However, can you drive down costs? Have you investigated a dedicated server instead of EC2?
Re: I have 404,772 users. Now what?
#110A few months ago I did a post[1] where I promoted a page I made for my dad Nick Dooley[2] which was basically to test whether a simple "online busking" model has legs. The results were that about 4000 people downloaded the 1st track, about half that the second and roughly 350 each for the last two (I didn't do enough analysis to know if those last 350 or so people were the same ones or not). Out of those, about 20 pe…
Cool concept -- I remember your original post on HN. I definitely think a site where musicians could ask for donations would be cool and I'd put my music there.
I'm apprehensive to do this on Fandalism though. If I promise money to my users I'd be setting them up for disappointment since the vast majority wouldn't make any.
In other words I'd probably rather the message be "Use Fandalism because it's fun and cool!" rather than "Use Fandalism to make money!"