Actually. In your defense I've clicked "listen now" and been happily jamming out for an hour now. You're doing great at finding great music for me. Just keep on doing that. :)
What a thoughtful comment, poub. Indeed, we wanted to get to having user profiles, playlists and other ways to interact with the community. That was the problem. We knew what we needed to build for our experience to be more sticky, we just didn't have the resources to do enough of it fast enough. The good news is, whatever we decide to do next can only be about 10x easier than what we just attempted. ;)
You're right, which is why Pandora has been relying on investor capital for over a decade, and Spotify is right behind them. They haven't had a profitable year yet and they don't have a viable model.
Our business model, on the other hand, would be highly profitable at anything over about $1M in annual revenue, up to $100M, without playing any commercials. The problem was not our business model, as it is for most companies in our space. It was our inability to scale the audience to the point of sustaining $1M in annual airtime sales because the product wasn't yet sticky enough. That was a factor of being underfunded and trying to do too many things at once.
The capital thing wasn't an excuse. We tried to start a far more difficult business than (also failing) companies in the space, with a fraction of their capital. If we had an engineering team of 10 people and a ton of money to acquire content, there is no question we could have built a stickier service, and the unit economics were already great.
Thanks for saying that, skyfaller. My co-founder was incredibly focused on curation at a high level. We often got notes from bands who were turned away that, upon listening, I thought...I would listen to this! So we tried to be flexible but we had to make sure people knew Earbits was a place of quality. Anyway, you have an incredible attitude about it. I'm glad you're able to take that feedback and do something positive with it. That is the sign of a great artist in the making.
Am I qualified to chime in? We just shut down today after 4.5 years. ;)
This is very true, and unfortunate. It makes it easy to feel like everyone is being successful except you. I realized this a couple years ago and, when talking to other founders, I just stopped sugar coating things about my situation. I would tell them about our struggles, what was going on, and its affect on me. I don't think I've ever been brought to tears as many times as this year. It is super painful, but lying about it is bad for all involved. You can't get the support you need, nor provide proper support to others.
I can definitely vouch for the dark days. I feel fortunate to be an eternal optimist who knows these things are temporary, but the startup lows are about as low as they come. On top of that, you have things like breakups, family emergencies and other tragedies that are already hard enough to deal with when you are not nursing a struggling company. When those things hit at the same time, it can feel impossible to do anything.
Seriously, as a founder, find a few people you can really confide in and do so. And, don't be afraid to say things aren't going well. You never know what people can do to help. On that note, though today isn't the best day for me to cheer up others, I'm available to chat for any founder going through dark days. joey@earbits.com
> It makes it easy to feel like everyone is being successful except you.
I'd say this is hardly a case only when you're a founder. Throughout life, if you keep high expectations of yourself (which is IMHO a good thing in the long run), you will constantly feel like people around you are succeeding, and you're struggling. I've sometimes felt that way, but the key, for me at least, was to learn to take it easy on myself from time to time and not to be sickly critical of my own work.
Sometimes people feel like everyone else is succeeding and they are failing because, well, it is true to some extent observable by them. (It sounds grim, but in reality you can mostly turn the tables if you invest enough effort.) However, sometimes you can get that feel if you constantly observe the people who simply set the bar lower. Psychological processes that drive us are curious; sometimes they may make us redefine success so that we can appear more successful to other people. But this is not a real, healthy gain: it's a pathological one. A giant, impressive pile of counterfeit, useless money, if you will.
Just my two cents. I'm most likely talking out of my ass :)
By the way, kudos to you and everyone else for being a founder. It sounds like both a great struggle and a fun journey, and everyone with the courage (or the madness!) to go down that path has my deepest respect.
Thanks, Neduma. Indeed, it's crowded, but that's not the reason these services don't succeed. Pandora, Spotify, Rdio, etc, all have plenty of users. They just don't have a sustainable model or approach.
Nah, you're absolutely correct. And in fact, it's crazy because one single song can have 3 writers, 8 performers, a record label, 2 publishers and two different performance rights organizations all with a stake in that track. But, we paid standard rates to publishers and only needed to convince the owners of the master recording to license the music to us, which is usually a label or band. Then we had listeners. We were mostly just trying to please those two groups, but that's because we paid the publishers outright.
