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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

by 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.
shams93 10y ago
Not everyone on indie hackers needed to build a community to succeed. In the area of music you need a community to succeed but in other areas like the AI based logo design, it was driven by the developer's work experience, and then he flipped that into a novel product, but he didn't start a a blogger he just found a novel application for machine learning to automate himself out of business as it were.
adamsea 10y ago
Hate to be this guy, but, by definition, sending emails cannot be "backbreaking", unless, of course, you develop serious posture problems.
- coralreef 10y ago
  Hyperbole is occasionally used in the English language.
  - patmcguire 10y ago
    Never.
    - nstj 10y ago
      This is the worst response to a message I've ever seen on HN
      - tomcam 10y ago
        You're literally Hitler
      - TeMPOraL 10y ago
        This is the response to the worst message I've ever seen on HN
    - dahauns 10y ago
      Literally never.
    - svantana 10y ago
      This is the best response to a message I've ever seen on HN
    - patmcguire 10y ago
      I regret starting this reddit-style oneup chain, my bad.
jstandard 10y ago
This response only addresses the extreme criticisms about saying they had a blog so it "must have been easy" or "it's cheating". 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.
- csallen 10y ago
  Totally agree with you. I know this is a nitpick, but in Jason's response to "What have been your biggest advantages", he actually does talk about running Indie Shuffle: > As mentioned before, being "part of the problem" provided the best advantage possible. There were a few competitors trying to solve similar problems, but none of them were actually part of the equation. As such, they struggled to convince others to sign up, and didn't have a steady funnel of users to push their way. Specifically, the knowledge he gained from running Indie Shuffle ("being part of the problem") and the "steady funnel of users" really helped him out.
  - jstandard 10y ago
    On 2nd glance, you're right. It could have been more clear ("running my music website was a huge advantage because..."), but it was indirectly acknowledged. Thanks for calling it out.
mark-r 10y ago
For an example outside of the music industry, StackOverflow was launched via the blogs of its two founders, Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood. I signed up right away because I was an avid reader of both of them. Without that jumpstart the site never would have built up the critical mass of questions and answers and subject matter experts that made it useful even at the beginning.

by csallen 10y ago

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.

shams93 10y ago

Not everyone on indie hackers needed to build a community to succeed. In the area of music you need a community to succeed but in other areas like the AI based logo design, it was driven by the developer's work experience, and then he flipped that into a novel product, but he didn't start a a blogger he just found a novel application for machine learning to automate himself out of business as it were.

adamsea 10y ago

Hate to be this guy, but, by definition, sending emails cannot be "backbreaking", unless, of course, you develop serious posture problems.

coralreef 10y ago
Hyperbole is occasionally used in the English language.
- patmcguire 10y ago
  Never.
  - nstj 10y ago
    This is the worst response to a message I've ever seen on HN
    - tomcam 10y ago
      You're literally Hitler
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      This is the response to the worst message I've ever seen on HN
  - dahauns 10y ago
    Literally never.
  - svantana 10y ago
    This is the best response to a message I've ever seen on HN
  - patmcguire 10y ago
    I regret starting this reddit-style oneup chain, my bad.

jstandard 10y ago

This response only addresses the extreme criticisms about saying they had a blog so it "must have been easy" or "it's cheating". 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.

csallen 10y ago
Totally agree with you. I know this is a nitpick, but in Jason's response to "What have been your biggest advantages", he actually does talk about running Indie Shuffle: > As mentioned before, being "part of the problem" provided the best advantage possible. There were a few competitors trying to solve similar problems, but none of them were actually part of the equation. As such, they struggled to convince others to sign up, and didn't have a steady funnel of users to push their way. Specifically, the knowledge he gained from running Indie Shuffle ("being part of the problem") and the "steady funnel of users" really helped him out.
- jstandard 10y ago
  On 2nd glance, you're right. It could have been more clear ("running my music website was a huge advantage because..."), but it was indirectly acknowledged. Thanks for calling it out.

mark-r 10y ago

For an example outside of the music industry, StackOverflow was launched via the blogs of its two founders, Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood. I signed up right away because I was an avid reader of both of them. Without that jumpstart the site never would have built up the critical mass of questions and answers and subject matter experts that made it useful even at the beginning.