8 ms·

@Pud can undeniably build products that are laser focused and useful. And his minimalist approach to company building is epic and I am a fan. But it's sort of

• deleted 10y ago
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• pud 10y ago
  ABP - Always Be Parlaying. I just made that up. Maybe it'll become a thing.
  • harryh 10y ago
    Cumulative Advantage!
  • aresant 10y ago
    Why not tweak out the "Our secret:" part of article to include the whole "capture a community" 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?
    • pud 10y ago
      There are two DistroKid banners on Fandalism.com. According to our tracking URL, the main one has been clicked 57,543 times, converting into 207 customers.
      • aresant 10y ago
        Bam. Added edit to my comment. Look forward to more posts and would love to see more on the "how we grew" side.
      • aresant 10y ago
        Bam. Added edit to my comment. Look forward to more posts and would love to see more on the "how we grew" side.
      • tspike 10y ago
        You didn't e-mail your list? I certainly imagine that would have made your life a little easier?
        • pud 10y ago
          True. Every Fandalism user does get 1 email, from Fandalism, about DistroKid.
          • demarq 10y ago
            Did you collect stats from that as well?
  • orasis 10y ago
    Thanks for keeping me highly entertained with FC back in the day!
• deedubaya 10y ago
  > 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 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?
  • aresant 10y ago
    I am not implying his built in audience was the reason for the success. 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.
    • pryelluw 10y ago
      He is also a good marketer. Thats the key.
  • pryelluw 10y ago
    Its sometimes interpreted as cheating if you leverage any other thing you may have developed. Like an audience or previous product.
    • x0x0 10y ago
      Not cheating -- no-one is making a moral claim here -- but to leave running Fandalism out of your description of your success feels like you're eliding crucial information. Like possessing a great marketing channel. And good for Pud for building it and using it! I read these sort of success threads as basically case studies, and that marketing channel is probably relevant.
• csallen 10y ago
  A similar situation: Jason Grishkoff built and grew his music submission site SubmitHub[1] "on the back of" his popular music blog Indie Shuffle. People said it therefore must have been easy, but that's not actually the case. He spent 4 backbreaking months sending over 1000 personalized emails to sign up the initial collaborators he needed to make the SubmitHub marketplace possible. The moral of the story is to be wary of succumbing to availability bias[2] and underestimating the work that goes on behind the scenes. 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 https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/submithub [2] http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/availability-bias.html http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/availability-bi... [3] https://medium.com/@theunixbeard/product-hunt-s-rise-d49249a1a2c0#.ddbokz70a https://medium.com/@theunixbeard/product-hunt-s-rise-d49249a...
  • lavezzi 10y ago
    Where are you getting the 4 months & 1000 personalized emails from?
    • csallen 10y ago
      I recorded a podcast episode[1] with Jason where he talked a lot more in-depth about how he got SubmitHub off the ground. Here's what he said: > To launch SubmitHub I hand-tailored more than 1000 emails to blogs. It took me about 4-5 months of doing it everyday to get through this list. It didn't just launch overnight, there weren't people banging at my door. I had to go and email these guys, and they didn't respond. So I would tweet them, I'd Facebook message them, I'd send SoundCloud messages, I'd send another email, then I'd try to find another contact... Those 250 blogs and labels didn't come overnight. I've consistently found it to be the case that there's a lot more information lurking under the surface when you sit down and talk to someone about what they did. What you can surmise from reading a short post or interview really only scratches the surface... which is why it's easy to underestimate how difficult it was for people to launch their successful businesses. A related anecdote: In Jason's podcast episode he talks about how someone read his Indie Hackers interview, thought "This idea is so easy!", and cloned the look and feel of his site. Of course their clone went nowhere. They didn't do any of the hustling, marketing, selling, etc, because all of that was behind-the-scenes stuff. It was invisible to them, so they failed to factor it in, and instead gave too much weight to the obvious parts. [1] Shameless plug: The Indie Hackers podcast launches tomorrow morning at https://IndieHackers.com/podcast https://IndieHackers.com/podcast! It'll be three episodes to start, 1 hour each, and Jason's is #1.
• pryelluw 10y ago
  He is a good marketer. Good marketers are always building audiences and brands. Turns out that the audience for a failed brand can support a new one. So what if he uses previous audiences? The question is: why aren't you? (unless you are happy to be an anonymous employee (which is totally ok)).
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• dpweb 10y ago
  Helps that DK is one of the very few services out there worth paying for. I can build most things myself. 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.
• joeblau 10y ago
  > But it's sort of disingenuous to play David Vs. Goliath here like his line about launching: 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_of_david_and_goliath https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_the_unheard_story...
  • s_ngularity 10y ago
    A young man with no military experience vs. a giant who's killed every soldier in the army who's attempted to fight him qualifies as an underdog story in my book. Also I'd assume archery skill doesn't really transfer very much to using a sling
    • wavefunction 10y ago
      I heard an interesting segment on NPR one or two years ago that delve into "David vs Goliath" and they made the point that we have the situation completely backwards. Some scholars believe that Goliath suffered from a genetic disorder that may have left him rather "simple" in intellect. And slingers during that era were vicious killers capable of hitting birds in flight along with other examples of their prodigious skills and lethality. The segment made the case that David vs Goliath was a stone-cold killer against a relative 'innocent,' it just happened to be David who had the distinct advantage.
      • s_ngularity 10y ago
        David being classified an underdog doesn't necessarily mean he wasn't actually at an advantage compared to Goliath in some ways, just that it appeared that way. In fact if you read the biblical passage it seems to paint the picture that David was actually extremely skilled, and he claims to have killed bears and lions before while defending his sheep. It's the fact that it's a shepherd boy taking on a warrior giant that makes in an underdog story, not the skill with which David wielded his weapon.
• dpflan 10y ago
  Nice phrase - "brings a data-gun to a knife fight" - that encapsulated the idea quite well!
• jhong 10y ago
  But he entirely bootstrapped fandalism too. So his argument is completely legit. Any one of those competitors could have built a fandalism for customer acquisition too. Anyway, his point is he did this stuff all as a one man shop with no funding. Nobody can dispute that. He is David.
  • tommynicholas 10y ago
    Which is amazing but irrelevant - if the lesson is "build something obsessively for years until you have an audience to then, also over the course of 4 years, monetize on another project - assuming you get both of these things exactly right even though they're both unbelievably hard" there's no lesson. 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.
    • jhong 10y ago
      Why do you presume these were two separate projects? He built fandalism, then realized from running it that his users wanted something like distrokid. It is one big company called Pud Inc.
• jhong 10y ago
  But he entirely bootstrapped fandalism too. So his argument is completely legit. Any one of those competitors could have built a fandalism for customer acquisition too. Anyway, his point is he did this stuff all as a one man shop with no funding. Nobody can dispute that.
• pud 10y ago
  Fandalism was bootstrapped too (and didn't much affect DistroKid's growth; at least not as much as I would have hoped).
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