I'd be more than happy to help! Also building a product on Clojure, hopefully launching a private beta in few weeks 🤞

awesome, keep at it! so I am working on a collaborative [multiplayer] reviews site for music, i'm currently splitting up the features per tier and was looking for feedback on that. what sort of app are you working on if you are comfortable sharing at this juncture?

is it like a competitor to https://www.allmusic.com/ ?

more than happy to share, private beta signup is here: https://collieapp.com

yeah, a competitor built on websockets and clojure, with different goals

collie sounds cool, just watched the video 😄

i have a collie mix 🐕‍🦺 so I like the name, too

my first question would be about the business model: what is the incentive for people to pay for music reviews?

fair question. the problem of music discovery for new musicians and artists is a real one. so this is mainly aimed at helping musicians get exposure, which is the target customer.

say you have a band, your band makes a new track, you want to get it heard by lots of people, there are not many ways to accomplish that today without: spending a lot of money or building an online presence over time

yeah, it's hard, one reason I don't promote my own music - I just don't have much time :-)

I'm still not clear on the business model: what do I actually pay for?

great question! the free tier: weekly fresh music newsletter lifetime membership (one-time charge) : can add stuff to the review queue, can rate tracks, can access chatroom

how much validation of the model have you done?

I only built/worked on B2B so that's where my experience is, not so much with B2C, but being a musician there's something that feels off - reminds me of my experience with https://www.submithub.com/ - you pay to get your music reviewed, and if all goes well - the tracks are being published on high traffic sites/playlists/etc but in practice people have very little success with this type of approach

recently there was a project on hacker news that re-affirmed the model for me (http://non.io) although their's is donation / pick what you want. my model has a bit of a twist: the lifetime membership price increases slightly with each new customer (to add a sense of urgency to sign up)

I think having a thread on https://www.reddit.com/r/WeAreTheMusicMakers/ could be helpful to gauge interest - in tactful way of course :-) they would be your target market so it's a great way to do some validation

ah yeah, the pinboard approach - I always wanted to test that but it doesn't work with b2b really

pinboard?

thanks for mentioning submit-hub, it's not exactly the same but it's yet another thing in the space 😅 my plan is to fashion a high quality collection of fresh tracks into a curated music magazine, so this is sorta step 1 slash the ongoing harvesting step

so if you submit something to submit hub there's no guarantee it gets featured?

at all

pinboard did the same pricing strategy: the price was going up by a fraction with every new signup I believe

or just every month would increase

Nice. I used chat-gpt4 to run some numbers and i'm just increasing the price by $0.25 each customer.

our app is basically a curated music database and the entrypoint to the database for new music is the "review queue" you can add any track by any artist (your band or another band) to the queue once a month with a lifetime membership and it's guaranteed to get into the database and the feed. i guess that's the main difference with other things.

the only thing I'd suggest is to do more research with more musicians, even though I'm one, I'd pay only if I saw that there's some traction and people have results... which is a bit of a catch-22 for you

getting critical mass for marketplaces (this is sort of one) is very hard, as you're building for two user bases (reviewers/listeners & artists)

and review sites like G2 or Capterra (in the software space) always felt a bit weird to me, they really are playing a weird game while trying to be impartial in the process

I hope this helps in any way!

@U0JEFEZH6 it helps a lot my friend i appreciate it. yeah, thinking of 2 customer bases is key, since the one customer comes when there is plenty of the other