Some Insights on How We’re Doing

[Peter DeLegge]

We’re on track to open LinkedMusicians for public registration [EDIT: later this month]. There’s been A LOT of feedback and suggestions for the site and, I hope you’ve noticed, that we’ve implemented a lot of those suggestions. While some of that functionality came from my purchasing additional scripts (plugins), some important improvements and fixes made to the site are due to two amazing and skilled community members that are the kind of people who add enormous value to any community they’re part of, @lamia6 and @doug. These are talented people, and even more, very kind and giving people who’ve volunteered their skills. While I’m on track to spend double the budget I had originally allocated for this site, these two have enabled me to do what I otherwise did not have the budget to do. Work that would take hiring a developer to do. So I cannot adequately express how grateful I am to them and if you enjoy this site too, they deserve your thanks for making it better.

So, I wanted to share with everyone who is part of the Early Adopters Group how this site is progressing. It’s on track with my goals for the site and extremely encouraging. This information is taken from the analytics data for the site from the past 30 days.

What The Site Analytics Tell Us About LinkedMusicians Visitors

• Lurkers Outnumber Registered Users by Around 10x
  The site is has a lot of lurkers.
• People Love the Deals Forum
  Unsurprisingly, registered users and lurkers favorite part of the site is the Deals forum.
• We’re Just Beginning to Rise Up the Ranks with Google 
• People Spend a Lot of Time at LinkedMusicians
  The average visitor spends more than 9 minutes at the site.
• We’re Geographically Diverse. 
  While the group is heavily skewed male, geographically, we’re a very diverse group. The country with the most users is the US, with around 30 percent of all users. The rest of the group is from other parts of North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa, South America… — we’re just in the beta testing phase of the site and already, we represent a lot of the world. Our top 10 nations visitors come from (in order; a little more than 30% of our visitors are from the US, no other country has close to that percentage):
  US
  Switzerland
  Canada
  Germany
  United Kingdom
  Italy
  France
  Serbia
  India
  New Zealand
• The Majority of Visitors See the Site on Their Desktop Computer
  While a little more than 56% of site visitors view the site on their desktop computers, mobile phones are not far behind. The most popular phone OS for our visitors? iOS.

LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.

Check out my music. 

102

[Fleer]

Looking great!

11

[mibby]

Yes! Coming along very nicely Peter! And thanks a ton @lamia6 and @doug for helping Peter out!

Apollo Twin Duo USB | ARC Studio | Fender Studio Pro 8 | Windows

1

[patrickwichrowski]

Great!

https://linktr.ee/patrickwichrowski/

https://patrickwichrowski.bandcamp.com/

1

[Vst0nE]

nice Peter, great progress, hope users from previous deals location will be able to allocate this forum

1

[Peter DeLegge]

On Vst0nE said

nice Peter, great progress, hope users from previous deals location will be able to allocate this forum

It greatly helps when people in the group tell others. That’s really the key to this community growing. That and participating. If you take out 2 developers and 3 accounts I set up for testing, I think our count of real community members during this beta test period is 86 people. But the reality is, more than half of the people I registered have never made a post. So getting started is the hard part. Once that happens, I think people will see that while it’s different than Cakewalk Forums, or whatever forums they’re familiar with, it has the same core functionality — it actually has a lot more functionality.

I created the “Cake to LM Equivalent Links” to make it easier for those who came from Cakewalk Forums to be able to find the similar forums here. Again, the hard part is getting acclimated and making that first post. But there’s still a bunch of people from Cakewalk Forums that I greatly enjoyed that still haven’t come here. And I actually took a look at Cakewalk Forums yesterday and it’s desolate. Not many people aren’t posting there. I really wish we could get more of the group that shared their music over here, because that group meant a lot to me. They were really supportive and encouraging of others, and I really wanted to take that and build on that, because of how much that encouragement meant to me personally and how much I enjoy encouraging others.

Before my injury, I was a perfectionist musician. It has made it very difficult to accept that I can’t play like I once did or even at a level I’d consider passable and my voice was never very good, so sharing anything with my voice on it publicly was embarrassing and hard to get used to. But I’ve made some progress in my playing in the past 3 years. My timing has improved a bit (not a lot, but a little). Having that group of people encouraging me and then encouraging others — one musician who PMed me that she wanted to collaborate with me — was this very talented guitarist. And I think she connected with me because tendinitis stopped her from being able to play. We connected due to that experience and I thought it was a beautiful thing how people can be mutually supportive. I really want that to be a big part of this community. Yes, I realize it’s deals that brings everyone aboard and keeps them coming back, but what really made Cakewalk Forums special to me was how people were encouraging and friendly to one another.  When I shared that motivating factors behind me wanting to do this, it really was about that as the foundation. I wanted to strip out the developer forum owners doing screwed up things and focus on how to make a community that lifts up people, that encourages people, that celebrates music and is an environment that does all it can to facilitate that.

All of those other communities that people go to — they focus on one thing, making money for the forum owners. And yes, my expertise is digital marketing, I know how to do that. But that isn’t the driving force of this community. My big goals for this community are about the emotional side more than deals. Yes, we’re going to make this site an amazing research tool that removes the bias of developer-owned forums. But more importantly, this community will focus on areas that sites focused purely on profit don’t care about, the human side of this passion. We’re going to ensure this community doesn’t become toxic, because I know that’s incredibly important to me and many others. But it takes a group. It takes people being active at this site and in reaching out to others to make it grow. Right now, we’re seeing things move very slowly. So even messaging friends here and encouraging them to be active helps. Any efforts reaching out to friends from Cakewalk Forums — and any other forums is appreciated.

LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.

Check out my music. 

4

[Frank]

Thank you for the insights and statistics. I find it interesting to see the worldwide distribution of users.

1

[joegyork]

Thanks Peter, lamia6 and doug for your great work

Yes the Cakewalk Forums are very quiet nowadays!

1

[Peter DeLegge]

On joegyork said

Thanks Peter, lamia6 and doug for your great work

Yes the Cakewalk Forums are very quiet nowadays!

I hope that everyone here keeps inviting folks from Cakewalk Forums here. While we have the majority of regular posters from Cakewalk Forums here, there’s still a bunch of people I miss from the Song Sharing Forum who haven’t come aboard. I would love to see them become a part of this community. As we open for public registration, I’m always going to hold a special place in my heart for the people who encouraged me as I attempted to play music again. My desire to have them here isn’t really about the growth of the site, it’s really purely just a very personal thing. Having such encouraging people around when I was attempting to play music again — frustrated that I can’t play at an acceptable level anymore, and still hearing encouragement. It was very meaningful to me. And I know that there was one member who also went through a similar experience — also with tendinitis — that was there that was going through the same thing, except she didn’t walk away from music and still had a lot of her chops. I want this community to encourage others. I thought that was an amazing and beautiful thing about that Song Forum.

Okay, I could just hear my teenage daughter telling me, “Dad, you’re getting cringe-y.” But that encouragement has meant a lot to me, and I suspect it means a lot to others. There’s a bunch of things that motivated me to do this forum. It started out of my wanting a place that wasn’t toxic like VI-Control, or KVR, to a much lesser extent. But Cakewalk Forum — especially the Songs forum — was really a special environment where hobbyist and semi-pro musicians were really encouraging one another and I really do hope that we can bring that to this community. We obviously love to buy stuff, and I assume that we’re all using it to make music. I think the next step is to encourage one another with that pursuit and step out and share what we’re doing in an environment where we’ll find supportive, like-minded people.

LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.

Check out my music. 

3

[Hoppy]

Hey Peter – Cool stats! It’s been fun to get in on the ground floor of LM. Once fully opened up, I think the site is going to take off quickly!

Soul, Blues, & Jazz on a Wurli or Rhodes

1

[Teebacca]

Thanks for all the hard work Peter, site looks great

Thom

1

[Peter DeLegge]

On Teebacca said

Thanks for all the hard work Peter, site looks great

Thanks. But don’t give me all of the credit, it’s been a team effort.

A great deal of the credit for making this site better goes to @lamia6. She has put in many hours fixing issues with the site — stuff that the developers I have on contract didn’t do as well, and in some cases fixing errors one of the developers made. And she’s been doing it purely to help the community — for no charge. It’s like how @cclarry contributes non-stop just because he enjoys contributing to the community. Larry never needs to be asked to help out, he just goes; the man is driven and helpful by nature. Lamia6 is the same way. I’ll be frustrated that developers I have contracted to handle issues are taking a long time to fix minor design errors and I wake up in the morning to a message from Lamia6 that she just fixed everything and found a couple of other small things I didn’t even know about.

Anyhow, I just want to give credit where credit is due. This site is a team effort and I love that. There have been a bunch of wonderful people here that have pitched in.

LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.

Check out my music. 

1

[pseudopop]

So… When does the public registration open?

[Peter DeLegge]

On pseudopop said

So… When does the public registration open?

TL:DR Version
I am planning to do that this week.

The Full Version 
I realize that I’ve revised the date of opening to the public a few times and I’m still not completely comfortable with public registration, as I’m trying to reduce the amount of time required for me to manage the site. I’m also thinking about the costs involved as the site is on track to hit half the bandwidth transfer in my contract at the current volume. If it goes .1-5TB the data transfer over it’s an additional $50 US per month. Plus there are costs for SMTP provider and an email service provider which vary based on volume (of course, costs are relative to traffic / use levels). All of this is a lot of work to manage as a hobby.  I have a business to run and this greatly cuts into that. Getting this started, managing and improving the site, taking requests, and helping people with issues was requiring more than 70+ hours a week, but last week I was able to reduce that to around 40+ hours. I want to get it to around 15 at most, which means, I need more volunteers, especially moderators. And of course, opening the site to public registration will mean I need to put in a lot more time into moderating and troubleshooting the site and email.

Once the site is opens to public registration, we will be seeing spammers, puppet accounts by unscrupulous developers and shills posting affiliate links and codes, and worse. That means there’s going to be A LOT MORE moderation required. Whereas right now, with this little group of 100 beta testers and maybe a couple thousand posts since we’ve launched, there has been several posts that violated policies and none of them were really bad.

Consider this. Cakewalk Forums is the outlet of a mid-size software brand owned by a billionaire. It’s based on around that business. VI-Control is itself profitable from developer advertisers and subscribers as well as an outlet for its owner to promote his business, which, from his public statements, brings in around half a million dollars a year (as of a couple of years ago, it could be more or less today). KVR likely brings in a lot more money than VI-Control due to the size of its community and e-commerce capabilities. Additionally, all three of those sites — while all revenue producers for for-profit companies — use unpaid volunteers to moderate their sites while making profits (yes, I do consider that exploitive, but it has been a very profitable model for these forum owners). LinkedMusicians is my passion (hobby) project. It doesn’t have any advertising, and with its current and likely first year community size, I don’t think it’s even worth the energy to set up advertising (even though I might attempt it, just to get the ball rolling). Realistically, I seriously doubt this site will be able to fund itself within the next two years. Maybe — maybe — by the third year, it can generate enough revenue from contributions, affiliate links, and advertising to pay for itself, but that is hopeful, at best. I don’t have any plans for this to become a profitable business. I’m expecting that not looking at more than 2,500 hours I have put into this site, the first year costs will end up at around $2,000 US (hosting, email, theme, various plugins and subscriptions, security services, etc.).

I am planning to put up a contribution page so that community members who believe in LinkedMusicians can contribute. I have had a few people offer contributions of $100 US or more, but I have yet to give them a way to contribute. But again, beyond costs, my greatest concern is the time investment and finding volunteers who can moderate. If anyone wants to help in that area, please send me a private message.

LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.

Check out my music. 

2

[pseudopop]

On Peter DeLegge said

[…] If it goes .1-5TB the data transfer over it’s an additional $50 US per month. […] I’m expecting that not looking at more than 2,500 hours I have put into this site, the first year costs will end up at around $2,000 US (hosting, email, theme, various plugins and subscriptions, security services, etc.).

That sounds really expensive! How much is the transfer limit before they start charging extra?

I really appreciate the countless hours you’ve spent to bring this site to fruition, and I’d be happy to contribute in some way, be it money or labor. I’m not currently in a position to give much of either, but little streams and all that.

[Author]

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