Ask HN: Traction, but no scalability, nor revenue model

13 points by resdirector 11 years ago | 12 comments

I recently restored The Technicolor Web Of Sound, a fantastic 60s psychedelic radio station that went offline in 2011: http://tunein.com/radio/Technicolor-Web-Of-Sound-Redux-s223835/.

It has 25 followers, regular listeners, and one evangelist.

However, this not really a "startup" business with rapid scalability nor revenue model.

That said, it has the beginnings of traction (listeners, growth, passionate reception). Having tried two startups previously, I appreciate just how difficult and rare it is to get even a small amount of traction.

My question is, should I continue to pump time and energy into this at the expense of some of my other side-projects, some of which I believe to be far more lucrative, but without traction yet.

In other words, I've (re)built something that a few people absolutely love. And if I understand pg and others writings, this is an incredibly important first step in building a successful business.

Perhaps the best strategy is to just have faith that I will eventually hit upon an idea to generate revenue and make it scalable to large numbers of people.

E.g. one idea might be to take the best ideas behind TWOS redux and apply it to a plethora of other music genres. Make a large number of very good radio stations, think soma.fm.

steven2012 11 years ago |

Does anyone on HN do anything because they actually have a passion for something regardless of its profitability, or is the horrible stereotype of doing whatever makes a nickel every 1000 clicks really true?

If you care about the radio station and have a passion for it, continue. If you're only in it to make a buck, then just forget about it. The last thing people want to read is "Sorry, I'm going to be closing this because it didn't get the traction I needed. But this journey gave me a great learning experience, so keep watching this space for my next startup!"

anthony_franco 11 years ago | |

I think passion projects are fairly common. This one has been on the front page all day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8085213

Seven years of dedication and hasn't made a penny.

You can easily find many more examples. It all depends on the circumstances of the person and whether they're in a position financially to dedicate their free time to a project.

outside1234 11 years ago | |

There is a difference between passion and going-broke/burning out-because-the-site is exploding in popularity. The first can be fun, the second is work, and much of that work is probably not fun (sharding etc.) and not the creator's real passion.

At that point, the passion has to become a business because, well, that is where the effort is going to have to go. Maintaining it as a passion project is not longer sustainable and you have to choose.

wiseleo 11 years ago |

It's a hobby. It seems you are falling into the trap of vanity metrics when paying attention to number of followers.

Let's say you had 10000 followers who each listen for 2 hours per day, how would you make money?

By the way, I still pay for http://www.di.fm and have been listening for many years. I pay them $7 per month. I can stop, but I like their playlists and know that whenever I want to code with good background I can trust their music selection to be productive.

Internet radio is bandwidth intensive, which tends to eat profits. I would work on something else where you are more likely to make money in the near term.

You can always run this as a hobby to recharge your mind while taking a break from coding your other projects.

jewel 11 years ago | |

> Internet radio is bandwidth intensive, which tends to eat profits. I would work on something else where you are more likely to make money in the near term.

Out of curiosity, I ran the numbers. 10k users at 96 kbps for two hours a day would consume 315 TB/year.

On AWS, that would cost you $246k/yr, just for the bandwidth. However, if you use a dedicated hosting like 100TB, you can get the cost down quite a bit lower. I think you'd need four of their servers at $215/mo each, which comes to $10k/yr. (Note that a single gigabit port has enough bandwidth to serve nearly all 10k listeners concurrently by itself, so four servers would cover peak usage.)

There will be other costs, of course, such as licensing. The yearly cost is potentially low enough that advertising could cover it. Also, a $5/mo premium account would generate enough revenue to cover another 30-60 free users.

A related thought: Internet radio is an ideal application for peer-to-peer distribution, since even a low-end DSL connection can support several other peers. It can also tolerate dozens of seconds of latency. If each listener is capable of supporting two more listeners on average, you'd be able to run the radio station from your home internet connection without any permanent infrastructure.

resdirector 11 years ago | |

It's a hobby. It seems you are falling into the trap of vanity metrics when paying attention to number of followers.

You've nailed it here (such an easy trap to fall into).

resdirector 11 years ago |

Thanks for all the replies, everyone, and sorry for the late response. Every reply here has been very helpful.

hashtag 11 years ago |

I can't answer you directly but if I were in your shoes, I would ask myself what I would want to accomplish from this. If the answer is something vague like grow it into a sustainable business with more users, then it's probably not the right one to pursue (for me in my own opinion).

Every idea with intent of becoming a business has the goal of growing and being sustainable. That's too vague. I would prefer to work on ideas that I care deeply about because those are ideas I enjoy the most and if that is true, there is often a more in-depth goal of where I wish the idea or project to be headed even if I don't necessarily have all the details or answers mapped out.

If you don't have an answer like this in mind, at best my suggestion is to keep thinking until something feels right.

iaw 11 years ago |

I listen to Chris Hardwick's Nerdist podcast. One of the things he points out about his career in show business, is that he didn't become truly happy with it and accomplish his goals until he started doing what he had a passion about.

resdirector 11 years ago |

Clickable: http://tunein.com/radio/Technicolor-Web-Of-Sound-Redux-s2238...

pbreit 11 years ago |

I had trouble following your writing but would suggest that you need at least 10,000 audio listeners of something before even considering it side income.

sixQuarks 11 years ago |

sorry, but 25 followers is nowhere close to "traction". I would say traction in this case is at least 1,000 followers.