So we’ve officially chosen a date to hold ourselves to.
June 15.
(2 weeks was wayyyyy too ambitious).
But things are a bit slow, because Life.
- I just finished my 3rd year of college, so I’ve had to figure out how to spend my time this summer. Currently in the process of splitting time between my newsletter and HiNote.
- Wyatt and Valentin have full time jobs. Now that the pandemic is lightening up, tasks from work are rolling back in.
- And Wyatt, he just had a second child. So understandably, his daddy duties come first.
Nevertheless, slow motion is better than no motion.
The demand for a product like HiNote increases with every passing day.
Switching APIs
Previously in our tech stack, we’ve been using Daily.co, a simple Video API, it’s what Valentin, Gabe, and I used to build Chatparty in 15 days.
However, Daily had a glaring issue for our business model. It only allowed for 200 participants in a video room. Meaning that if we have an artist with over 200 fans that want to watch them, then we’re SOL.
Wyatt wasn’t having it. So he did some research on Video API alternatives. We eventually landed on Mux. And it seems to have no limit when it comes to how many people can participate in a stream.
And it turns out that Daily actually uses Mux in their backend. Insane
Features to Focus On
Thanks to a blog post I found, we’ve decided to put extra focus on 2 features:
- The broadcast page —where fans can watch an artist’s livestream
- The event page —the page artists share to fans to sell their event
Why?
We suspect that artists sharing the links to their upcoming events on HiNote will be the bulk of our traffic. So we want to make the process of sharing as easy as possible and we want to make it easy for fans to purchase the ticket once they land on the event page.
Then when comes time for the performance, we want artists with have a great streaming experience. We also want fans to enjoy watching their favorite artists on HiNote.
By making those features really really good. I predict, we’ll do well.
Operation: Hype Generation
I got feedback that our early access site looked undercooked.
So I decided to add some gifs and change the wording a bit to make it more personable and memorable.
It looks better on desktop, still gotta work on that.
I also changed the button from “Get Early Access” to “Request Invitation”
Here’s why:
I want to deploy “the exclusive nightclub tactic.” —where you make your product looks great, you spread the word, but you don’t let anyone in. Yet. Then when the line is super long and FOMO-worthy, you get attention from popular people. And you invite them into the club and let the normal people watch them walk in before them. The idea is to maximize attention at every level and generate desire through false scarcity, mimetic behavior, and FOMO.
The plan I devised is to infiltrate fringe musician and music-loving communities on the web. Then over the next few weeks, I’ll participate in conversation and ask probing questions about how musicians are handling performing during this pandemic era.
I’ll gain insight and build trust so that over time I can plug HiNote into conversations that seem appropriate. This will generate hype from a “grassroots” level and then have that hype reach influencers and celebs over time.
I’ll have regular artists fill up the waitlist and use that to activity to attract larger artists to the platform, who will then attract more artists to the platform, and so on.
The exclusive nightclub.
Pressing Onward
Anyway, we’re still building, building, building.
And June 15th isn’t too far off.
So keep your fingers crossed and wish us luck.