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Ask HN: We are launching our first service today - any advice?

5 points by samwilliams ↗ HN
Hi all,

We have been working on our site [1] for about a month and we think it is ready to launch now, but we are not entirely sure how best to go about it. Obviously we have a few ideas but we would love to hear some more experienced opinions.

Many thanks, Sam and India

[1] www.nusic.fm

5 comments

[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 31.4 ms ] thread
CoachSeven
What do you do? From your site, it looks like you let people upload songs for others to hear
samwilliams
People submit URLs for songs that they like, others can then listen to them and rate them in a HN like fashion.

There is also a play queue that lets you stack up songs and listen while you browse and comment etc. This supports multiple sources seamlessly (so you could be listening to something from Soundcloud and then Youtube - it all seems the same to the user).

You can search for multiple tags at once and a combined chart will be generated and ranked (tagA OR tagB). We plan to support a full set of other operators in the future like AND and NOT. So if you like trance and house but disliked songs that verged on dubstep you could search something along the lines of '(trance ^ house) - dubstep'.

There are lots of other cool little things, but they should be fairly obvious.

andthejets
This is actually pretty cool! Nice work.

I don't have any clue about launching but I'd try posting to popular sites and maybe see if some tech sites will cover it.

samwilliams
Thanks! I am very pleased you liked it.

We certainly will try some of the tech blogs, but we are going to start with some music ones first, as that is more of our crowd than the tech audience (we think).

kayman
Initial feeling, if it's music related, orange and bright colors convey fun and lightness. I'd also play with different fonts. How about making the play button prominent instead of tucked away to the right. Like always on top, header length or bottom hide/show bar.