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I have 404,772 users. Now what?

pud.com

111–120 of 198 posts

Re: I have 404,772 users. Now what?

#111
Imagine an internet radio station where all the songs are user-recorded tracks and the listening is based on collaborative filtering and you pressing like/dislike next to the currently-playing song...

400K users is a big base. If 1K or more were listening to the 'radio' at the same time, the collaborative filtering kicking in could be great!

Re: I have 404,772 users. Now what?

#112

Pud, 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?

At $2,500/month in costs, even if he drives it down to $1/month, the site still isnt generating any money. Generating money is the problem, not cutting costs. At least that's the problem at hand, at the moment.

Re: I have 404,772 users. Now what?

#113

All of the suggestions or what Philip had been thinking of are pretty "generic" solutions to the "problem". I spent 5 mins on the site, clicking around and my first impression of the Fandalism is the community and Fandalism's tag line is "Use Fandalism to show your work and meet other musicians". The community is most likely a mix of musicians AND music lovers. So even Fandalism's original goal of serving musicians i…

Wouldn't http://www.pledgemusic.com be the Kickstarter for musicians? I didn't think Kickstarter involved themselves much in projects beyond the screening process.

Re: I have 404,772 users. Now what?

#114
Pud, as I said here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3520013) 80 days ago, the way you keep putting out quality products is great. It's funny that your post on getting users (http://pud.com/post/5239917032/users) isn't even a year old (although you don't seem to be using a lot of those methods for this project).

Do your project ideas (big and small) just come to you or do you have a process?

And any thoughts on doing a small post on a day/week in the life of Pud? Like how much time you spend on projects (planning, coding, designing), and whatever else you do like jamming. You clearly know at least a little about time management and/or avoiding procrastination.

Re: I have 404,772 users. Now what?

#115
most of the ideas posted by you are revenue models through advertising (where the real value of the user base is not extracted) or with more cumbersome product ecommerce tied with shipping which you don't want to do.

I bet you have these other ideas too - just wanted to point out that if it is an expensive hobby why not keep it as close to heart while making money too:

1. Sell amateur music and published albums of artists on the site.

2. Get musicians collaborate to create a Virtual Learning Environment

3. Let musicians get a private space to blog and evangelize their music to the visitors of the site for a fee. Support reviews, rating etc

4. Let musicians collaborate and organize music tours through the portal.

5. Let fans connect to their favorite musicians - ask questions, get autographs or learn music for a fee

Just some of the ideas to keep it close to music

Re: I have 404,772 users. Now what?

#116
post #105
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Engagement doesn't mean time on site. Millions of people check Reddit 10x per day for That's a great kind of engagement.

Re: I have 404,772 users. Now what?

#118
post #115

most of the ideas posted by you are revenue models through advertising (where the real value of the user base is not extracted) or with more cumbersome product ecommerce tied with shipping which you don't want to do. I bet you have these other ideas too - just wanted to point out that if it is an expensive hobby why not keep it as close to heart while making money too: 1. Sell amateur music and published albums of ar…

pud, get on the phone with this man. He's bound to have more ideas.

Re: I have 404,772 users. Now what?

#119

Going 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 jus…

I totally agree with this last point. I help run a small sailing website. We have no ads on our site, but we send out regular email newsletters that contain ads. These ads more than pay for the site itself, and we can easily switch advertisers between the newsletters. It's been a lot easier than I thought to target advertisers, because we have a load of data on how many people have subscribed and click-through rates etc. We typically sell the adverts in blocks of 3 or 6 months, where we send out 2 newsletters per month.

The most clicked-on links in that email newsletter is a list of the recent posts made to the classified section on our website. It's free to post an advert up on the classified section of something you're trying to sell, but you need to be a member of the site to do that. The newsletter acts as a reminder - so people can regularly see what's been recently posted, as they probably haven't visited that part of the website recently.

Re: I have 404,772 users. Now what?

#120
post #110
post #86

A 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!" r…

A social network dedicated for musicians can't yield any blame on you. Musicians need visibility. You would provide it for free and take a small cut on the one who get traction and earn money from it. It sounds to me like a fair deal. This is a kickstarter like model specialized for musicians.
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