I recently read @pud's Medium post about Founder/Product Fit and couldn't agree more.
Many people go through an interesting transition from idea to side project to startup. I did. Making the leap to "startup/company" is a huge commitment and you really need to ask yourself if this is something you want to do for several years. Once you accept investors money and assemble a team that relies on the company for their livelihood, you're stuck. You can't just quit. This something I've thought a lot about lately. Thank God I love working on Product Hunt but not every founder loves what they do.
Ok, I'll stop there because I have a lot of pent up thoughts on this that I'd like to expand on later but I'd love to hear more of @pud's thoughts on this (and anyone else that wants to chime in). 😃
@rrhoover Hi Ryan. To me, when a side-project becomes a main project, that's a good sign. Means I'd work on the thing even for free. Which probably means I love it :)
Many of my projects started as side projects, and those were always my favorites.
In fact DistroKid started as a side project of Fandalism.com, my free social network for musicians with over 600,000 members. If you're ever looking for someone to jam with or just want to meet other local musicians, that's the place.
Thanks for making Product Hunt!
@pud@rrhoover This is an awesome post. I'm gonna start quoting it when people ask me why I stopped working on Feast. Right now when I tell people I simply wasn't passionate enough about food to dedicate my life to it for the next 5-10 years, they give me funny looks. /cc @davidspinks
I've only heard great things about DistroKid and love what @pud is doing with it.
You wrote here that DistroKid will generate over $5 million in royalties for 50,000 artists this year. What is your primary method for getting new artists on the service?
@_ryangilbert Hi Ryan. We launched DistroKid with a couple blog posts that got to the Hacker News front page. We also had a popular Reddit post about it.
I think a lot of people were waiting for a service like DistroKid (as opposed to many products that are totally new concepts, such as, say, when Twitter launched). So word spread fast on UGC news sites.
Also lots of people say nice things about us on Twitter etc. See: https://twitter.com/distrokid/fa...
It helps that when your customers are musicians, several will be high-profile. So when they say nice things, you get a real bump.
Hi product hunters! Here's some background on DistroKid. Ask me anything.
I started working on DistroKid a couple years ago. We make it easy for musicians to get their music into iTunes, Spotify, Amazon. Google Play and others. We charge a low annual fee that allows unlimited uploads and we take zero percent of your royalties.
I built DistroKid because the existing do-it-yourself distributors (Tunecore and CD Baby) charge money for every upload and/or take a percentage of royalties.
So if you uploaded 5 times per year to Tunecore, after 5 years you'd be paying at around $1,250 annually ($50 x 5 uploads x 5 years) just to keep your songs in stores.
And if you use CD Baby for your first album, then become a star, you could potentially owe CD Baby millions.
With DistroKid, you pay just $19.99/yr. That's it. Regardless of how many albums you've uploaded.
So DistroKid works for musicians who don't necessarily work in long album cycles, and instead want to put out music whenever they feel the time is right. DistroKid is also good for hobby musicians who want to put their noodlings in stores so their friends can hear it. DistroKid is also popular with labels because we offer discounts if you're uploading for multiple artists.
DistroKid has a bunch of new features coming out over the next month or two that are pretty cool.
Hope you love it all. Keep making music and be prolific.
I've been somewhat involved in the music tech world for many years. When Pud first told me about DistroKid I didn't think he'd be able to unseat existing digital distribution powerhouses, but wow was I wrong. In a small number of years he's scared the shit out of them and stolen many of their customers. Amazing product Pud!
@mulligan Thanks! Upon reflection, the bar wasn't very high. Existing distribution companies weren't modern--partly because their founders left long ago, causing stagnation to services that were otherwise cutting-edge back in their day.
That said, I'm thankful for companies like Tunecore and CD Baby because they laid the groundwork for new companies like mine. The business was much harder back when Jeff (Tunecore) and Derek (CD Baby) were forging ahead, building the infrastructure that makes DistroKid possible.
"If I can see further, it's only because I stand on the shoulders of giants."
How did I not hunt this before?! I've recommended Distrokid to musician friends of mine. @pud I think I read something from you that said it took you about a year to build Distrokid. Was it that long mostly due to actual building, or did it have more to do with dealing with the major labels?
@lylemckeany Hey Lyle. Thanks for the reccos!
Yes it did take about a year to build the first version of DistroKid. Which was a shock to me. Turns out there's much more to music distribution than just moving files around.
There's making deals with every store & streaming service, integrating with at least 20 different APIs, ingesting royalty reports, banking/making artist withdrawals possible, a ton of anti-fraud & infringement detection, and much more.
If I knew how complicated it would be, I may not have started the busines in the first place.
But now it all works so I'm very glad I did!
Many thanks to @pud for building this. It is a really remarkable product.
I am a musician, and when it came time to negotiate the release of our new record with our labels, our band was steadfast about retaining full ownership of the digital rights in part because I was aware of Distrokid. This is by far the most economical and transparent digital distribution solution available to independent musicians.
What kills me about Distrokid is that I can't seem to find any negatives about it! I suppose some might want other distribution channels, but DK seems to have every major base covered. @pud what are some of the criticisms or feature requests you get often?
@esoelzer Hi Eric. Mostly we hear nice things. But occasionally we may receive criticism due to issues beyond our control. Like if a store is slow in making an album live, or if your name is similar to another artists' name and a store decides to group you both together as the same artist.
We work closely with the stores to fix these issues if they happen. But there are a lot of moving parts.
Thanks for the kind words! Use DistroKid and you won't be disappointed.
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