aloneinkyoto

After being out of beta for a little less than six months our first attempt at a startup (bitspaceapp.com), a music player that lets you upload your music collection, has around 800 users of which only a handful are active users and 25 are paying customers. Did we succeed or fail? Is it too early to tell? Right now we are asking ourselves in what direction we should take our business, if any at all.

The idea for the product was simply born out of my own frustration of loosing my music collection in a hard drive crash and my nerdy need for having a neat and nicely cataloged and index music collection. We didn't set out to create the most original product or to revolutionize anything. We simply wanted to create a good product that did something mildly useful and that could attract a lucrative niche of users (record collectors). But it's not like there is no competition in the music player market, rather the contrary. With competition from products like Spotify and Grooveshark that offer on demand streaming from a wast library of licensed music -- something we would never be able to offer -- its hard to make yourself heard in the marketplace.

So the question really is: We think we have created a useful and well executed product. But how do you know if your business model will work? When can you reliably say that it is a success or failure? 6 months? A year? 5 years? And what measures of success should we consider?