Ask HN: Is this an idea worth pursuing further?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1016519

by scrr • 17 years ago

20 19 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Hello everyone,

two weeks ago me and a friend were in a bar and suddendly we came up with the idea for http://www.learntoplayanything.com . By now we have put some work in it and we get a few visitors each day. (Although Google apparently hasn't indexed everything yet.)

It was all done in the spirit of "f*ck it, let's just do it and see what happens", but now we wonder if it was such an excellent idea after all.

What do you think? Is it worth to invest more time into this website? What features can you imagine that would make the site more valuable?

We are currently thinking about inserting links to guitar tabs and piano sheet music and changing the layout to something more pretty.

cmelbye• 17 years ago

Pretty cool idea. It would be a more open competitor to Apple's GarageBand music teaching features. I think your idea of adding more value to the site would be a good one. Apple has quality and integration with a nice music creation software. Perhaps you could include more information from lyric sites and guitar tabs and sheet music as you noted.

PieSquared• 17 years ago

If you included guitar tabs and perhaps allowed users to upload custom tabs (so that people can improve on publicly available ones), it'd be absolutely great. I'd use it on a weekly basis at least, if not daily.

larrykubin• 17 years ago

Agreed. I regularly visit guitar tab sites like ultimate-guitar.com. Most of these sites are loaded with ads and have terrible design.

I'd love to visit one that has a clean design with correct tabs and videos without all of the cruft. This site seems like a great idea if you can manage to load it with plenty of content without running into legal issues (I've seen many tab sites get shut down).

k0ban• 17 years ago

Can you please e-mail me at kos@cbmsnetworks.com. We are almost ready to show service like you hare looking for, so I am interested in your opinion on it. I will provide you with the link.

joshsharp• 17 years ago

I have to disagree. There are many sites for guitar tabs, and they have a massive database of tabs already. Competing against them generally is not a good idea. Links to tabs for the song in question would solve the problem without wasting your time trying to compete.

A better use of your time would be to cultivate your collection of videos. I think a collection of searchable video tutorials on how to play songs is a neat idea that addresses a different need.

yters• 17 years ago

I, for one, like the idea and can see myself using it in the future.

sant0sk1• 17 years ago

clickable link: http://www.learntoplayanything.com

vaksel3• 17 years ago

it's a good idea, and has some decent traffic #s(i.e. "sweet home alabama guitar lesson" 14,800 searches/month) but it seems to be a little bit competitive. Go exact searching for "sweet home alabama guitar lesson" and you get 185,000 sites.

I think "sweet home alabama guitar tutorial" is a much better fit. Only 53,700 hits, and none are really an exact match for the search on page 1(which is probably true for all other searches). And that still gets you 6,600 searches a month.

So update your titles to be [SONG TITLE] guitar tutorial.

And you should be able to hit some decent traffic numbers with that.

vaksel3• 17 years ago

also, this will be a SEO play for you, so I suggest finding a domain that has guitar tutorial(s) in the url. Having that will help you biiiig time when it comes to ranking high for results

greatreorx• 17 years ago

I like the idea. Not sure about making money from it, but definitely see it as useful.

typo on home page... "Also contact us if you want to contribute by helping uns organizing the links."

Can you add more specific information to your search results lists? For me right now, this page... http://www.learntoplayanything.com/component/tag/green%20day returns 20 results that all are "Boulevard of Broken Dreams " - would be more useful if there was some additional info to differentiate.

On this page: http://www.learntoplayanything.com/component/tag/green%20day... Which is the third page, the paginated link to page 1 actually goes back to the third page. The link to page 1 on all paginated results pages seems to link to the current page instead of page 1.

appathy• 17 years ago

Another typo: "recommend us to your firends"

ggrot• 17 years ago

The way I see it is that you are taking advantage of bad search results in a specific area. You are simply creating a web page that tries to match a specific video with a specific search query and monetize by putting your ads around the content (the youtube video).

If you simply built a single page with a collection of links with that text to the video of interest, you'd largely serve the same purpose for users - search engines would rank the actual video higher for that query, but unfortunately you wouldn't be inserting yourself into the middle in order to extract revenue.

Your model is negatively effected by search engines improving their ranking algorithms with respect to video content. That seems like a bad place to be.

vaksel3• 17 years ago

the problem is that all that great video content is only labeled one way. You on the other hand can get traffic by letting those users who search using a different string find it.

You win by getting traffic. Google wins by getting the people the results they were looking for. And the people win by not having to do a 2nd, 3rd Google search, and everyone is happy.

There is a very long tail to Google search. If you don't rank in #1 position for "guitar lessons" you can rank for #1 position for "guitar lessons using sweet home alabama song"

Sure it's not as profitable, with "guitar lessons using sweet home alabama song" you might get 30-40 hits a month, instead of 5000, but that's all you, and a few thousand such queries, will mean 80-100K users coming to your site every month with zero marketing on your part.

Aiming for that long tail is a great way to build up your traffic and site in the early days, until you start ranking higher for those more desirable phrases.

That's what I'm aiming for in this stage with http://styleguidance.com hit up the long tail, build up traffic, content and reputation, and eventually Google will throw a bone our way, and decide...hey there is this great style and fashion Q&A site, that has all the answers for the style category, why don't I give their results preference over those generic blogs to get my users better answers.

Tichy• 17 years ago

I like it.

Clicking on the logo should bring you back to the homepage.

mattyfo• 17 years ago

As a guitarist this is a very painful spot for me and good instruction is worth a lot. If you can figure out a model that connects people like me with quality content efficiently then you win.

mkramlich• 17 years ago

ask Adrian Holovaty what he thinks. maybe even get him to contribute. he's clearly a good hacker, plus, a good guitarist. rare mix. may be smart to leverage it.

NickNYC242• 17 years ago

This is a good aggregation idea for learning - why not find a few content providers/creators that could serialize a process for learning - so pieces of a song, or basic chords for guitar. Get some content made by people looking to raise their recognition, and customize it for the site. I'll bet you could get free contributions, or even mechanical turk it for different languages. Ad-supported is definitely the model right now, but what about taking requests and getting people to "donate" for specific content providers to produce requests - you may have a runaway hit for people that can tab/teach/play. Best of luck.

petervandijck• 17 years ago

If you are hoping to turn this into some kind of business or money-generating thing, it's not. You are creating very little long-term value, as the others have noted, it seems mainly an SEO play.

I do like the basic idea though, If you really wanted to make it good, you'd have to create much better navigation/browsing/finding options (that's the only value you're adding), and you'd have to seed it with 10000s of videos, and you'd have to add something, like forums or reviews something, that increases the value for users.

scrr• 17 years ago

Thanks everyone for your input! Those comments are very interesting and we have a lot to think about now. :)

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