Show HN: After 2.5 years on my side project, it has hit £500/month revenue

Hey, professional composer/producer here. I thought I'd give you some honest feedback from one of your target users. These are my more or less unfiltered thoughts as I scroll down the page. Apologies in advance for the bluntness:

Man, that iPhone photo on the right is a little blurry and way too big.

"The smart way to share music privately." Me and everyone I know uses Dropbox. The majority of us pay for Dropbox accounts that allow you to disable downloads, so it's as private and secure as I need it to be. Beyond that, there are a number of more specific competing services already -- for example, ReelCrafter allows me (a film composer) to host video and audio for less than $17/month, with insights. What are you offering that I don't already have or can't get elsewhere, quite possibly for less?

The "Get Started" button is above "What is SongBox?" Why would I get started when I don't even know what it is?

Profile Page: Feels like social media. That in and of itself kinda feels like friction.

Insights: This is nice. I definitely like this, because I do sometimes get annoyed when I send music to someone and don't hear back, and it'd be nice to know if they listened. This solves a real problem for me.

"Stop Wondering If They Listened." Yup, there it is. I like it.

The photo below this section is unnecessarily huge. This page feels weirdly like it has too much text and too many photos at the same time. Not sure how to solve it but even though the design is clean, it's a little fatiguing.

"What SongBox Users Say" Speaking of too much text, all of these are too long and there's no way I'm reading all of them. Either roll them all up into a "Testimonials" page and link me to it, or choose the biggest name you have a testimonial from and feature it higher up on the page -- and keep it short.

Pricing. In a vacuum, this pricing is nice. But it's one more cloud storage service I'm paying for, and in that light it's suddenly way too expensive for the higher tiers. Highest I'd personally go for Pro is $20/month and that's still pushing it.

"How Does It Work?" This section should be much higher.

"Don't Worry About Sharing Your Music." This page now feels redundant and way too long. Axe this section and merge the unique info elsewhere. Ditto for "Share your tracks anywhere."

All in all: The front page could be condensed to half or even less than half of its current size/info dump. The service seems solid but enough for me to try the free version, which if I'm honest will probably result in me forgetting about it -- paying something no matter what would at least put in my mind a sense of needing to use it.

I know you say in your post that your pricing was wrong, but if it were me (with the little info I currently have -- who knows, maybe you tried this and it was wrong) I'd do the following: -Lose the "Starter" as it is and "Semi Pro" tiers. -Retitle "Hobby" to "Starter" or something similar (though I don't love that -- I think you should entirely focus on professionals, i.e. people willing to pay money long-term; anyone needing these features already has a free Dropbox/Google Drive account that already works just fine, so name your tiers appropriately). -Now you have two tiers (easy, simple, doesn't require too much thought). Allow both to use any file type (that's a frustrating and arbitrary limitation). Price the former Hobby-now-Starter-or-whatever-you-call-it tier at something stupid low, like $2/month. Make Pro $15 month or so. -Allow a 30 day free trial with Pro features -- again, no credit card required. -If someone with a Hobby-or-whatever account tries to cancel, allow them to disable downloading for an extra $1 per month -- a hidden "middle" tier. I guarantee you that lack of disabling downloading will be the #1 reason people cancel their account.

This has the potential to be great and you've clearly put a ton of work into it. Wish you the best and hope this succeeds.

Cool stuff. Apart from a Software Engineer, I'm a musician/producer and the idea of having better stats about who listens to what and for how long sounds pretty appealing. I'm giving it a spin now and will write my thoughts as I go through it:

- My first concern before signing up that the landing page is not answering very well for me is how the UX looks for my listeners. I see a screenshot of what seems like a mobile app, but I'm not sure how accurate that is, and how it would look like on i.e. a laptop

- After I signed-up, the main call to action asked me to create a "SongBox". I guess this is the term you use for a playlist, and the in-app short tutorial also hinted at that but I'm wondering if this is a term that some people might be confused about, at least at the beginning. I definitely did get a bit confused

- I have some copyrighted songs, but also some demos I'm working on at the moment. It'd be nice if the UI made it clear whether is safe or not to share non-copyrighted files through the platform to get feedback, etc (some platforms such as SoundBetter apparently have some protection for this as part of their terms of use). I don't know if this is the case so I will only upload copyrighted files

- A small thing that can probably be easily fixed: I started by creating a SongBox, which prompted me to upload the files I wanted to add to the SongBox. After I uploaded some files, the songs remained unchecked by default, which meant that the main call to action to continue creating the SongBox would not actually add the songs by default to my SongBox. Because I started with the goal of creating a SongBox (the main call to action) and I did not have existing files, the product could be really sure that I did wanted to add those songs and at least check them my default or omit the whole song-checking phase

- Having two different screens to select the songs I want to add and then to also sort the selected ones felt a little bit weird. Maybe they can be joined into a single screen where you can select & sort at the same time? (i.e. the selected ones bubble up to the top and you can sort them in place?)

- I get the link to share, which is exciting, but again, I have no idea how this will look like, so I have to open a private browser tab to try it out before feeling confident to share it. Maybe the product can at least show me how it looks on this screen? (i.e. embedded at the right?)

- I didn't realise I could customise my bio until opening the page. Maybe the wizard I followed could have suggested me to do that if I was creating my first SongBox and I did not fill it yet?

- Cool stuff! I can see analytics coming in right away! What did seem super weird is that if a song is playing and I jump to another section of that same track (i.e. to skip part of it) then SongBox dashboard shows that as 2 different plays. Having the ability to know at which points of the track (i.e. minutes & seconds) people try to skip forward to another section vs just stopping the song would be killer!

- After some initial plays the average listening time looks very skewed. It shows a lot, lot more listening seconds that I actually did. Maybe there is something wrong with the average calculations?

Overall I think the idea of having better analytics for how people listen to your song is super nice. I'll keep an eye on the platform but the stats I got based on my own plays through private browser tabs seemed not very accurate, so I'm hesitant to trust it more for the time being. Hope that helps!

First of all, I like it!

Some, hopefully constructive criticisms, mostly nitpicking/paper cut bugs. My pedantism doesn't mean I don't like it ;)

- As somebody else mentioned, the email field on the signup page is a bit off-putting just to try it. Maybe add some text on why you need to know it (password reminders, whathaveyou). "Display Name" was already mentioned too for something that could be improved.

- I think it would be good to have a password confirmation box on signup. I have enough family that constantly mistypes their passwords to know that this is a thing :P

- When I created a box and was lead to the upload page (Step 2 of 4), I somehow assumed it would let me drag and drop straight to the page. Instead I had to click the button. Not a major thing but having a shortcut (like popping up that file picker once a dragover event happens) would be nice I think. Same for the Tracks page.

- After creating a box and uploading a track on the next page, it might be a good idea to pre-select that track ;) The list of selectable tracks is also a little too subtle. I had to think a few seconds what's going on; ideally I'd have to think less about it.

- It doesn't allow me to upload ogg or opus or straight wav. Again, no biggie, but the error text there could be more helpful. "The accepted file types are audio/mpeg,audio/mp3" is not so great. I later saw it says that "starters" are only allowed mp3 on the account page. Does this mean other formats are allowed when upgrading? I didn't see any info about that.

- The text listing the benefits of the different tiers on /upgrade is extremely thin and hard to read when viewed on a regular non-retina display on a Windows box. It also is different to the different tiers text straight on the homepage. And /upgrade has no favicon (tries to get /favicon.ico instead of /favicon/favicon-32x32.png that other pages use). It also shows me a $ price and an £ approximation. I'm on € and used to $, but seeing £ is mildly confusing. It also has a title of "Become a member", but I am already a member :P

- It now tells me: "You have exceeded the number of available SongBoxes on the Free tier. Consider upgrading." But the "Your SongBoxes" says "My Private Songboxes (0 of 5 in use)". I did create a few boxes and subsequently deleted them. Now I got none and am not allowed ot make any more. Also, shouldn't that be "(0 of 1 in use)" on starter? Bug?

- Speaking of which, you sometimes use "SongBox(es)" and sometimes "Songbox(es)", come to think about it.

- I like your privacy policy, short and simple. But it doesn't state if and for how long you will retain data after the user removes it. That would be a clarification worth making.

- Since you're pretty much about privacy too according to your privacy policy, a way to delete the account would be nice.

Would I use it? Maybe, but I am not a "pro" and the pricing is too expensive for the me (I am a cheapskate) at 10 bucks/month / 100 bucks/year for just 15 tracks. My price range for something like that, being "Hobby", would be maybe around 20-25 bucks / year for 50 tracks, but that's just me.

Hi, Congrats on hitting that milestone . As others have said, the site looks great and it's clear you've put a lot of time into it. I can offer a few feedback points:

The pricing tiers could have better names, from a quick glance I wasn't sure which plan fits me. Maybe take a look at what are common traits for customers in each plan and see if you can come up with a one word persona for each plan that way.

The product tours after signup are really clear and crisp well done. I've found that getting users to Wow fast is key to drive conversions, and that tours aren't enough. They show me how to get to wow but don't bring me there.

A common pattern is to prepopulate the app with some data and lead the user to a likely wow event quickly. That's super hard, because you need to know what wow is, but it's gold when you crack it.

I've asked customers "What made you decide to give us money" and that can get some good insights towards what wow is.

I just visited the site for the second time, and my dashboard is empty because I haven't done anything. A real user will likely churn, because they don't know what to do. Nudge them hard towards the action that will bring them to wow.

I'm parroting patio11, but your pro plan is priced to low. Try raising prices on it (a lot) and see if anyone goes for it. Anecdote: I set a pricing page to have $50, $180 and $1200. $50 sold the most, but one day someone self served themselves an annual $1200/month plan, which is 24 $50 customers. Point being, if someone wants to give you a lot of money, give them the chance to do so.

Last point, I just noticed the video under the the pricing section. My personal opinion is that it's weak for marketing purposes, it tells me how to use the app, but doesn't immediately show me what the app can do for me. The point of a video on a marketing page is to get me excited to try and then convert. Make me feel excited ... On the other hand, it is a very good tutorial video, maybe put it on the dashboard of the app if the user hasn't uploaded any tracks yet.

Good luck!

This is a really great idea, kudos!

You might want to look at Docsend for feature and marketing inspiration - they started by allowing mainly startup pitch/sales decks to be tracked in much the same way your audio clips are, but have since expanded to a wide variety of enterprise use cases. I can only imagine that the music industry has many such use cases, including enterprise-style auditing/reporting needs and the ability to limit an audio file's distribution to within an organization. Not for the faint of heart to approach that, but there could be real opportunities there.

Some other random thoughts: This would be a perfect UI to standardize the pattern a lot of YouTube ads do: a ~5 second teaser clip that pre-plays the full material. With this and other network features as you grow (say, "submit demos to my SongBox drop box, and then I can quick-review my inbound SongBox feed"), you could gain the reputation of - "if I receive a demo on SongBox, it means that the sender is being highly respectful of my time." You might not want to build all that social-network functionality, of course, but it's a possible direction to go!

Also, custom subdomains (and beyond just removing branding, letting people add branding) could be a high-ROI way to add another pricing tier!