Grooveshark: How We Make Our Startup Successful

Published by on March 9, 2008

Taken from a post by Don Dodge on How to make your startup successful, I thought it would be interesting to see how we’re doing here at Grooveshark.

success failure

Here are Don’s 5 points:

  1. Build a product or service people want

    2. For every user to our site, they stay an average of 10 minutes. Compare this to Facebook, with around 15 minutes, and I’d have to say we are doing a pretty good job of keeping users compelled for our product.

  2. Customers are willing to pay for it

    3. We offer DRM-free mp3s for $.99 each. I can’t go into detail on how many people are purchasing, but they definitely are purchasing. When we have our $.29 sales, we increase the number of purchases by over 1,100%.

  3. Competitors can’t easily replicate it

    4. We have built a proprietary p2p platform that allows us to achieve far greater speeds than the Gnutella network and also allows us to keep all of the crap out of their systems. Through our collaborative Wiki-platform, we allow users to re-tag songs and fix all of the ID3 information that has been mis-tagged on the p2p networks. Also, for every $.99 song that users sell, they get back $.25. We have built our platform on compensating users, and this is a key differentiating point between us and the competitors. Plus, our company is built by college students for college students, so it’s a bit difficult to find a bunch as passionate about what we’re doing as we are …

  4. Assemble the best management team

    5. The fact that I’ve read Don’s post and am writing this post says something about our management skills :) Regardless, though, we are constantly looking for people who are better than us to bring onto the team, and I think that helps us all grow together.

  5. Hire only the best people

    6. When you’re in a college town, there is a lot to do besides work on a startup, and when we’re offering such little pay, the types of people we tend to attract are damn well motivated, smart, and looking to change the world. I think we’ve got this base more than covered. And I will attest that the people really are what makes a startup truly successful.