I recently restored The Technicolor Web Of Sound, a fantastic 60s psychedelic radio station that went offline in 2011: http://tunein.com/radio/Technicolor-Web-Of-Sound-Redux-s223835/.<p>It has 25 followers, regular listeners, and one evangelist.<p>However, this not really a "startup" business with rapid scalability nor revenue model.<p>That said, it has the beginnings of traction (listeners, growth, passionate reception). Having tried two startups previously, I appreciate just how difficult and rare it is to get even a small amount of traction.<p>My question is, should I continue to pump time and energy into this at the expense of some of my other side-projects, some of which I believe to be far more lucrative, but without traction yet.<p>In other words, I've (re)built something that a few people absolutely love. And if I understand pg and others writings, this is an incredibly important first step in building a successful business.<p>Perhaps the best strategy is to just have faith that I will eventually hit upon an idea to generate revenue and make it scalable to large numbers of people.<p>E.g. one idea might be to take the best ideas behind TWOS redux and apply it to a plethora of other music genres. Make a large number of very good radio stations, think soma.fm.
Does anyone on HN do anything because they actually have a passion for something regardless of its profitability, or is the horrible stereotype of doing whatever makes a nickel every 1000 clicks really true?<p>If you care about the radio station and have a passion for it, continue. If you're only in it to make a buck, then just forget about it. The last thing people want to read is "Sorry, I'm going to be closing this because it didn't get the traction I needed. But this journey gave me a great learning experience, so keep watching this space for my next startup!"
It's a hobby. It seems you are falling into the trap of vanity metrics when paying attention to number of followers.<p>Let's say you had 10000 followers who each listen for 2 hours per day, how would you make money?<p>By the way, I still pay for <a href="http://www.di.fm" rel="nofollow">http://www.di.fm</a> and have been listening for many years. I pay them $7 per month. I can stop, but I like their playlists and know that whenever I want to code with good background I can trust their music selection to be productive.<p>Internet radio is bandwidth intensive, which tends to eat profits. I would work on something else where you are more likely to make money in the near term.<p>You can always run this as a hobby to recharge your mind while taking a break from coding your other projects.
I can't answer you directly but if I were in your shoes, I would ask myself what I would want to accomplish from this. If the answer is something vague like grow it into a sustainable business with more users, then it's probably not the right one to pursue (for me in my own opinion).<p>Every idea with intent of becoming a business has the goal of growing and being sustainable. That's too vague. I would prefer to work on ideas that I care deeply about because those are ideas I enjoy the most and if that is true, there is often a more in-depth goal of where I wish the idea or project to be headed even if I don't necessarily have all the details or answers mapped out.<p>If you don't have an answer like this in mind, at best my suggestion is to keep thinking until something feels right.
I listen to Chris Hardwick's Nerdist podcast. One of the things he points out about his career in show business, is that he didn't become truly happy with it and accomplish his goals until he started doing what he had a passion about.
I had trouble following your writing but would suggest that you need at least 10,000 audio listeners of something before even considering it side income.