Bandhub (http://bandhub.com) is an online music collaboration community.<p>We provide easy-to-use software for asynchronous, video-based, music collaboration. We make it easy for you to get to know like-minded musicians around your interests, develop relationships with them over time and stay connected on an ongoing basis by regularly making music together and sharing with the overall Bandhub community.<p>PROBLEM: 99% of the world's 500M people who play an instrument or sing do it recreationally, as a hobby. For people like us, it is very hard to get to socialize meaningfully around music ( forming a band, playing in gigs ). Yet those meaningful social experiences around music are what we aspire to the most. Making it easier to get those experiences is in our opinion the #1 problem in the musical products industry. The internet hasn't done much yet to help solve this problem. You can publish your performance in YouTube or Soundcloud but nobody will pay attention to it ( only the 0.1% of musicians will get attention ). The average recreational musician will be ignored.<p>INITIAL FOCUS: Our current product is good for the subset of people that are REALLY active in their hobby of playing an instrument/singing. That is people who play/sing for 2hrs every day when they come back from work/school. Bandhub users now spend those 2hrs using Bandhub instead, as the workflow is the same to what they use to do before Bandhub ( i.e., meticulously learning & practicing songs ) but now they get super meaningful social experiences by being part of "collabs" in Bandhub, which are multi-instrument online video-based collaborations.<p>MARKET: $30B/year spent worldwide in Musical Products ( e.g., guitars ) and Lessons. We believe meaningful social experiences around this hobby are the most valuable experiences people are looking for and whoever succeeds in providing them will capture a big portion of this overall market, and maybe also grow this market 10x.
This is a really neat idea. I know a lot of musicians who struggle to find other musicians to jam/start a band with. Generally, they find people who say they're musicians and willing to dedicate time, but those people turn out to be flakes.<p>How are you going to vet your users to ensure that these are the more "serious" hobbyists, i.e. the people that are playing/singing for 2 hours every day?<p>One last frank question: how do you plan on making money?
Please please PLEASE authenticate over https.<p>Currently you're just SHA512'ing your users' passwords and sending the hash over the wire in the clear. This is INCREDIBLY insecure and you're putting your users at risk.<p>I don't know a good resource off the top of my head to best practices, could someone else provide a link?