And his minimalist approach to company building is epic and I am a fan.
But it's sort of disingenuous to play David Vs. Goliath here like his line about launching:
"I figured only a small number of smart people would somehow find us among the masses."
He's just like the rest of us - just build a great product and be lean guys!
But oh wait he launched DistroKid on the back of the HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of registered musicians already using his other site - Fandalism - founded years before.(1)
EDIT - why I am a fan of pud is in the children to this comment he brings a data-gun to a knife fight and sorts out my impression w some facts.
(1) https://techcrunch.com/2012/04/06/philip-kaplan-fandalism/
The other lesson is, as Pud said in reply to you, always be parlaying. Spending years building up an audience that you can market to might sound like "cheating" to those of us without such an audience... but then again, spending years acquiring programming skills before starting an online business might sound like "cheating" to non-developers. In reality, it's simply a smart idea, no more and no less, to leverage existing advantages like a unique skillset, valuable knowledge, an audiences, personal connections, etc.
Specifically, building an audience is a great precursor to launching an online business. Growth is hard, and starting from zero makes it harder. And anyone can build an audience! I recommend checking out Ben Gelsey's analysis of Product Hunt's rise.[3]
[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/submithub
[2] http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/availability-bi...
[3] https://medium.com/@theunixbeard/product-hunt-s-rise-d49249a...
I don't think it was easy nor cheating. Both of the founders mentioned here are smart, capable, and engineered whatever advantage they had.
Another perspective on self-promotional articles (not an inherently bad thing) like these is they downplay or omit the influence another venture had on building their current one. The SubmitHub article has a specific question about 'what have been your biggest advantages' and it surprised me that "running a high traffic blog in my target industry with a large email list" wasn't mentioned there. That seems like a huge advantage.
This is a sentiment I've seen in many of the comments here and in the HN comments about your SubmitHub writeup.
It's not meant as a personal attack at you, Jason, or Distrokid's founder. You're all doing great things! It's about breaking down what were likely the major factors in success so that information can be applied in one's own ventures.
I think it's valid to say that's how his product gained traction quickly, but I doubt that's why DistroKid is a successful company (guess, I'm not in the know).
Did I miss where that's against the rules of legitimacy? Or am I misunderstanding what you're implying?
DistroKid is successful because pud is a badass entrepreneur and a passionate musician that understood the pain point and executed beautifully.
But at the same time you can't underestimate - or edit the story to not include - the value of early traction and a built in "free" source of eyeballs while you're tweaking product market fit over four years.
The price of Pud hitting #1 on HN w/a piece of start-up content marketing is a little sort out - for the rest of us in the comments section here - about what lessons to take away from the content, and what else to consider.
I just made that up. Maybe it'll become a thing.
Or, fuck that, since this article is awesome self-admitted wantrepreneur wrapped marketing I'm just personally curious - how important was fandalism to (1) launch and (2) tipping yourself into current hockey stick mode?
Maybe not, people misunderstand David vs. Goliath as David being the underdog when David was a significantly a lot more skilled and was an archer[1]. @Pud was better, executed better and is beating the competition.
[1] - https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_the_unheard_story...
I know this from experience. I helped build a site used by millions of people in a particular demographic, and some of my collaborators on that project have been building products to help that demographic in deeper ways. The problem? It's still hard to get that right! 2 years into that effort they're still just starting to find product market fit for the second products.
We hit the absolute lottery to somehow get 5 million users for the original product, and they'll be hitting the lottery again if they get profitable on the second product to that audience. It's hard. Having money helps.
The lesson here in the 'hey I did it' (and the implication) you can too! No you can't. You need some edge. Not you're smart, skills, or idea. That won't cut it. Way too many wanna be moguls out there already working on your idea. Bringing a built in audience, that's an edge. DK a great service however.
Every one man success story on HN was largely possible due to existing audience from another entity that took years to grow
It's pretty disheartening once you read the article and it boils down to this very requirement: You Need An Audience First.
I'd like more insights and details in how lone entrepreneurs of HN were able to grow their audience.
Because when Step 1 is have a big enough audience the rest of the steps are pretty much a no brainer. It's this step that most of us are struggling with.
I've spent years in seclusion writing a SaaS that ultimately resulted less than the annual wage of a North Korean factory manager and it was rough both physically and mentally but it all boiled down to the fact that VC funded startups were able to do huge PR and buy ads, write blog posts, increase Adwords bid prices etc while I was not.
So yeah, you can succeed with a one-man biz outfit but not without an audience. It makes sense why Linkedin is valuable, why Pinterest, Whatsapp, Oculus, Twitch gets bought out even without revenues.
How I did it was very simple. I found where my customers were and I lived and breathed on the industry forums they were on. While developing my beta I had a very strong sense of the problems people were facing, how my product solved those problems, and why my product would be superior to competitors. Plus I was able to establish myself as a reputable person within those circles of people on those forums.
So when my beta was ready I was able to get people to pay for the beta by offering them a lifetime discount and the ability to talk with me throughout the development process so that they had some impact in shaping the product. Just from those beta users I was ramen profitable and I was able to bring on an intern for a couple months to help me speed up some of the development.
By the time I publicly launched I had a core group of evangelists (the beta users), a strong reputation on industry forums, and an amazing product that solved big issues my customers faced and I reached 5 figure MRR within a month of launching.
But the parent did say:
> Every one man success story on HN was largely possible due to existing audience from another entity that took years to grow
And I think your experience (and mine) echoes that: the audience didn't happen to be "yours" but it did exist. The problem you have to solve in our case is how to turn a "colder" audience into a warmer one (as it would be if you "owned" the audience already).
In hindsight, the other distributors are so clunky and expensive, the bar is super low. Like, if you wanted to compete with Google search it would be hard. But if you wanted to compete with something moderately terrible (with all due respect. i do respect my elder competitors and are thankful for the road they've paved) -- it's much easier to grow.
How we grew: Impress the hell out of your customers. Treat them with empathy and humanity. They tell their friends in the same industry. Don't spend a single dollar on advertising, it's grossly inefficient.
Don't do that. Talk to potential customers. Hang out in the places they hang out (online / offline). Start marketing early. Get users early. Never work in seclusion.
He's noted elsewhere that Fandalism wasn't as strong an aid as you might think. AND he had to build that audience himself too.
You can write blog posts and buy (small) ads and do some PR. Everyone started somewhere.
Do you expect to make a product that no one wants and somehow succeed?
That's absolutely not the case.
Some of them are - including this one, by the sounds of it - but it's not universal.
Why give away your hand like this?
I've been daydreaming about running a microISV recently - the ability to prioritise everything myself and crack on without justification appeals. Sure, I might be wrong, but that's OK.
Basically, the only productive way to challenge this company is to also go in solo and be tough as nails, and there are almost certainly less contentious niches you can take on if you want to do that.
"The untold story of the Microsoft antitrust case and what it means for the future of Bill Gates and his company."
https://www.wired.com/2000/11/microsoft-7/
> The only thing that surprised Microsoft about Netscape's strategy was the brazenness with which the upstarts shouted it to the world. Nathan Myhrvold told me, "There's a good analogy to bicycle racing. In bicycle racing, you don't want to be first until the end. What you want to do is draft the guy in front of you. And then, in the last minute, you dart out. The middleware gambit is about drafting the leader." Yet here was Andreessen publicly proclaiming in the summer of 1995 that Netscape's plan was to reduce Windows to "a poorly debugged set of device drivers." "They didn't save it up," Myhrvold said. "They fucking pulled up alongside us and said, 'Hey, sorry, that guy's already history.'"
It's hard to imagine a new competitor being able to compete with DistroKid on price at all, considering how cheap they are. An order of magnitude cheaper is probably out of the question. And these numbers (for the larger clients) are peanuts on DistroKid anyways, so even if you could compete on price it might not matter for much of the market.
So they aren't showing any of their hand (how to build audiences for customer development) but able to convey the image that they are somehow david vs goliath by sharing their stories like this.
They're taking a part of the market by storm.. specifically Indies with a "do it yourself" mentality.
Speaking as someone who works for a music distributor who has one of the "Big Three" Record labels as a client (Warner, Sony, UMG), I can say that in general we haven't been a great fit for really small time acts (though we're getting better). But the breadth of Distrokid's offerings wouldn't be able to cover that of a major label (and although they claim they could, there's no proof that they could handle that kind of scale either).
For instance, the base Distrokid plan doesn't even allow you to specify a release date (presumably it just releases it right away). Major labels often run promotions in different countries (necessitating different release dates per country). There's also pre-order dates, some of which are tied to instant-grat tracks for certain release dates in certain countries. The fine grained control necessary for a big act is missing from most DIY offerings.
Distrokid is serving a different market than the incumbents, and that's cool. I'd definitely recommend it over the other flat rate model distributors. But there's a reason Distrokid isn't delivering the next <insert big act here>'s album.
Not saying that DistroKid is perfect, but sometimes all it takes to be the best in any given market is to be exactly what's needed and nothing more. It may seem like giving one's hand away, but what could there be to add? There's certainly not much fat to trim. How would someone else compete?
But VCs are still investing in startups that do what DistroKid does. Those startups all take a percentage of royalties. So there's probably a sense of "if we release the new Jay-Z record, we'll make that $100MM revenue..."
DistroKid doesn't take any percentage. While we're leaving money on the table, the hacker in me (in the HN sense) kinda feels good that we're f*cking it up for everyone. At least I hope that's what we're doing. \m/
I wouldn't work at a VC unless I had literally no other options, and if I ever start a business, I'm doing it the way the author here did: honest work for honest wage. Maybe I won't get any Ferrari's but at least I'll have my dignity.
I don't know all the ins and outs but I have to echo the sentiment that it is better to make $1 for every $0 spent than $1 for every $2 spent. The latter makes zero economic sense. Any fucking idiot can spend money and make negative ROI. But the market dissonance is being fueled by low interest capital.
We are going to see history repeat again this year and when the water goes out, we'll see who's been swimming naked. They'll be back for the next bubble.
I'm convinced these bubbles are engineered who make money from the ride up and the ride down. Pump & dump on a national level but of course the men who play Gods need not play by the same rules they enforce on lowly mortals.
You will be able to buy a used Ferrari as they depreciate fairly quickly unless they are rare. They aren't built with longevity in mind and the parts do not depreciate in prices (expect to pay a Honda s2000 for clutch and F1 paddle shift pumps).
This is really cool, and love hearing about stuff like this. I love the idea of running a small team and scaling a product which doesn't have a huge overhead to make something which beats out the current market by just doing a few things better. Hats off to you man. Great stuff!
Naa!
See the wall over there, that protects our town? I built it, with my own hands! But do they call me the Wallmaker?
And the bridge, you know, that crosses our river, I built it, with my own hands! But do they call me the Bridgemaker?
But I tell ya, man! YOU F*CK ONE GOAT!
- the CFML guy
All but one of his companies (the one unsuccessful one) were powered by CFML.
This a lesson for all of us developers (myself especially!) who end up fussing over what kind of language/framework/server to use before writing a single line of code.
Props to @pud.
But you have to like it, esp. when you're a solo founder/programmer and it's what you do day in and day out.
Edit: For reference, here's the old website: http://web.archive.org/web/20071019010255/http://xeround.com...
We also have optional paid services, such as cover song licensing ($12/year per cover song), YouTube ContentID ($4.95 per single) and a few others.
> beating VC-backed startups
and
> DistroKid intentionally has a small team and no investors. We’re here to make the world a better place for musicians — not to make billions from them. We’d make ludicrously more money if we charged what the other distributors do.
It sounds like you're coexisting quite nicely with different objectives.
Just to nitpick, CD Baby isn't really a VC-backed startup either, right? I've been under the impression Derek bootstrapped it to revenue quickly similarly.
Anyone know if there is an equivalent for independent films?
However doing any licensing stuff if say you want to pay to put quotes from book snippets/lines from poetry/etc into your book the way distrokid lets you license a cover, nothing that I know of handles that space. I don't know if there's enough of a market for it because it isn't nearly as good a business decision for a writer as doing a cover can be for a musician, so smart writers avoid it.
Steps to reproduce:
1. Identify a poorly served professional segment where the business processes are not the primary task,
2. Automate their processes with vision and passion and empathy for the customer,
3. Make fans for life. Maybe also profit.
Minimum requirements to execute: at least one seed customer; wifi; coffee; time.
Rock on pud.
Rock on inopinatus
There are many people who want to know about your tech stack. I think the thinking goes: with one developer, it must be an insanely productive stack.
http://pud.com/post/9582597828/why-must-you-laugh-at-my-back...
is old, do you still use the same set up?
Click-bait title in my opinion. It's not because you don't need VCs to satisfy your customers that VCs are bad. They are good when you need them to satisfy your customers. Now distrokid-competitors' problem is not that they have VCs money, it's that they "hired" bad ones. Now, I grant you, good VCs for startups, those who gonna understand whats good and not for your customers may be rare... But look at google and facebook, they did right by taking VCs' money don't you think.
It might boil down to your definition of success I guess. Having taken VC money might have maximized their profit but at the cost of their top USP (very affordable service). Also they probably would not be loved as much by their customers and not doing as much of a good deed to the artists as they are now.
How do you handle support?
How are you able to find infringing music?
2 full-time support reps (who are amazing), so we're not really one-man, anymore.
> How are you able to find infringing music?
Obviously I can't get into details (lest the baddies figure out how to get in). But we have about 40 different checks to make sure the artist is who they say they are (or manually verify if the check fails) and other things.
Stories like this hearken to people like Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram's Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger.
Wow. I would like to understand more about this.
Then imagine talking to lots of 'stores', contracts, legal stuff and so on.
Just reading about what this is, I think even one year is quick.
Really interested to know about your stack and your deployment methodology. Did you build a bit/async infrastructure because of scale issues...Or is it inherently a mental model that is easy to grok easily?
http://pud.com/post/9582597828/why-must-you-laugh-at-my-back...
I have a feeling that this is the dream of a lot of people on HN. Having an easy to run business with a couple of people, without crazy competition, not needing to go sell it to VCs, and making a good amount of money while running it. Not judging, just observing.
All I was able to find were murky statements about 'dozen mayor services' and "150+ others" [0]. That page links "MediaNet Customers" page [0a] that displays 24 logos and links [0b] that displays list of 286 "MediaNet Content Partners". Is that it?
I was particularly interested about Bandcamp and all I've found that DistroKid mentions Bandcamp [1] and Bandcamp mentions DistrokKid [2] but no proof they really talk to each other.
[0] https://distrokid.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/1276117-... [0a] http://www.mndigital.com/about-us/customers.html [0b] http://www.mndigital.com/about-us/content-partners.html [1] https://distrokid.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/1601235 [2] https://bandcamp.com/help/selling
> Because the alumni network is so large and tightly knit, investors or companies who try to maltreat a YC-funded startup can usually be made to stop. [--> footnote] Except for the record labels, which are effectively a rogue state with nuclear weapons. There is nothing we or anyone else can do to protect you from them, except warn you not to start startups that touch label music. [0]
Your service does various tasks such as cover song licensing which are record label-facing. What has that been like?
And, congratulations on getting engaged.
It would be really slick if DistroKid had some kind of conversion process for CDBaby / Tunecore customers.
This basically would be the same as all the freemium companies out there that offer everything they do for free for a while till they build their product enough to start charging for it later.
My favorite line is in the original DistroKid TC article where @Pud says the goal wasn't to make money with this but to get more people to the social network.
Just curious, what % of artists gross over $19.99 a year?
I also think it may be disingenuous to suggest this can or should work for every type of business. While I happen to agree that services that simply do a pipeline, aggregation, or intermediary service are A) not something I feel VCs should usually spend their money on in great quantities if at all and B) are often the most ripe for disruption, I disagree that finding scaled efficiency for all types of businessses in this manner is possible.
I do however think it's wonderful you are promoting the more traditional idea of a business with this product at least which is the more canonical bootstrapping or self funding/ side job till you make it/ type thing that doesn't need tons of employees to be a good value for those that are a part of that business.
That's just my opinions though I'm glad it's been a success
Reference
[0] "52 Ways to Screw an Artist, by Warner Bros. Records" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13648245
[1] "Is Bandcamp the Holy Grail of Online Record Stores?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12324350
"The blockbuster effect has been even more striking on the digital platforms that were supposed to demonstrate the benefits of the long tail. On iTunes or Amazon, the marginal cost of “stocking” another item is essentially zero, so supply has grown. But the rewards of this model have become increasingly skewed towards the hits. Anita Elberse, of the Harvard Business School, working with data from Nielsen, notes that in 2007, 91% of the 3.9m different music tracks sold in America notched up fewer than 100 sales, and 24% only one each. Just 36 best-selling tracks accounted for 7% of all sales. By last year the tail had become yet longer but even thinner: of 8.7m different tracks that sold at least one copy, 96% sold fewer than 100 copies and 40%—3.5m songs—were purchased just once. And that does not include the many songs on offer that have never sold a single copy. Spotify said in 2013 that of its 20m-strong song catalogue at the time, 80% had been played—in other words, the remaining 4m songs had generated no interest at all."
http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21716467-techno...
Disincentives of the startup model at work!
These days it feels like you if your startup doesn't have polarized outcomes you're "doing it wrong".
In any event, I wish you well, live long and prosper
If only projects I / we had been working on for 2 years became so successful!
Maybe there was some momentum from his previous successes? If you're already a famous startup founder, then I guess it's easier to get users for your next startups. I've heard that this was the case for Slack, but I don't know how much truth there is in that.
Great product. Great support. Great example.
