[jason-grishkoff]

SubmitHub founder weighing in here -- thanks for sharing, Courtland! If anyone has any questions about SubmitHub or Indie Shuffle (technical or business), feel free to ask :)

Edit: in case you're curious, here's what the dashboard looks like for bloggers - http://i.imgur.com/mJG1LP5.png

[napoleoncomplex]

Just wanted to chime in and say Indie Shuffle is one of the best resources I've found for new music out there (for my taste).

While I have no need for SubmitHub's main purpose, the Popular tab looks like it can serve as another source of fresh stuff.

All in all, massive respect for your work promoting new music. As a sidenote, I'd happily donate some money through Patreon/whatever to support an ad-free version of the site (I know, I know, one in a million :).

[raywu]

Ditto, this popular chart is very cool: ranked by approval, http://www.submithub.com/popular

To me it seems like expanding on the playable features could make SubmitHub itself a very meta/cool place to submit through. A place to engage other artists. It's like HackerNews for music.

[SwellJoe]

My first thought was that the list of places to submit to is overwhelming. How do you plan to curate that, or do you just assume people coming to you already know exactly who they want to reach out to?

[jason-grishkoff]

Good question! Before submitting to blogs, users are required to filter the list by genre. They can then sort by the # of fans that outlet has, or -- even more handy -- there's a notes column in the far right that gives some vital statistics. You can see it here: http://i.imgur.com/pqMky6h.png

If you visit the "directory of blogs" page, you'll see a full selection of the filters: http://www.submithub.com/blogs

[XERQ]

Have you considered charging by number of fans per outlet, instead of a flat $1/credit? Seems to me the value is in the blog's reach, similar to CPM in advertising. It goes against the simplicity of your platform, so you could make it very simple: $5 for high traffic, $3 for medium, $1 for low (or a variation of that).

[SwellJoe]

I think there's a risk of this becoming a payola or pay-to-play sort of situation. I don't know that you're wrong, but it makes the model seem more predatory of musicians.

Here's what I like about the very small flat fee:

1. It is small enough for even modestly successful musicians to cover it. It isn't a monetary barrier to entry.

2. It is likely large enough to prevent the shotgun approach. This is one of the bigger problems of finding new talent for record labels and music writers, especially in the digital age when emailing or messaging someone a link to your song approaches zero cost...you can't realistically listen to every unsolicited track, so you have to filter somehow. This, at least, insures you don't get a bunch of stuff in genres you don't care about or know anything about. People have to choose a little more carefully.

3. It provides an incentive for writers and musicians to form a relationship so they'll work together again (with the blogger getting tipped again and the artist getting more coverage or useful feedback); it starts out as a monetary transaction, but once they've connected up and like each other, they could work toward building a scene (and the network that comes with that). In music, a scene is a force multiplier for everyone involved (e.g., Seattle grunge, Madchester, Atlanta dirty south).

Increasing the fee for big sites looks more like payola than merely a filtering tool to determine who has gone to the trouble to figure out the best handful of writers or labels to reach out to. If the profit of the site begins to come from the musicians they're reviewing, their incentives start to get lopsided in the wrong direction. I'm not saying all bloggers would do it, but there would be incentive to boost stats (with clickbaity stuff), and to get as many submissions as possible. Incentives should, IMHO, be directed toward increasing quality, maximizing the time a writer can spend on the artists they choose to cover, and providing the best feedback for the artists.

Anything that gives incentive to cheat the system will break it and reduce the quality of the network...likely even killing it. If there's even a slight notion that people are scamming musicians with this, it will (maybe deservedly) die.

[jason-grishkoff]

This is so incredibly well put. I cannot agree more.

[jason-grishkoff]

I've considered it for sure -- holding off on something like that for now, tho.

[0898]

Great project. How do you make sure the other blogs give people who've paid $1 feedback?

[jason-grishkoff]

Simple, really: they earn the majority of that $1 for providing feedback :)

To build on that, for most of these blogs this is the first time they're earning any mentionable revenue from running their websites. Not only is it making their lives easier -- it's actually rewarding them for their passion yada yada.

[nickpsecurity]

"To build on that, for most of these blogs this is the first time they're earning any mentionable revenue from running their websites."

So, you monetized websites that previously weren't with product their users will enjoy. Sounds like a nice design pattern for bootstrapping businesses on non-profit organizations or sites. One to remembet. I especially like you keep it win/win.

[dboreham]

What do you pay in transaction fees to take that $1 user payment?

[jason-grishkoff]

Payments are powered by Braintree (using their securely hosted iframes feature). Fee is 2.9% + $0.30. Same as Stripe and PayPal - they've all pretty much set this as a "standard" for the fee. Probably worth noting that the minimum transaction on SubmitHub is $5.

https://www.braintreepayments.com/

[the-dude]

Excuse me for hijacking your comment, but Stripe is actually 1.4% in EU. I can not comment on others, but the cap is an EU directive.

[dboreham]

>Probably worth noting that the minimum transaction on SubmitHub is $5.

Ahhh, thanks. I was wondering how you were doing a service with a $1 charge (I didn't see the $5 minimum mentioned in the portion of the article I read).

[rsmoore215]

Congrats on your success so far!! What's next for SubmitHub? Scale and build out the business or keep it small and more of a lifestyle business?

[dorfsmay]

Where do you run it? IaaS I'm assuming, but which one(s)?

[jason-grishkoff]

Digital Ocean (had to Google iaaS)

[dzjin]

Just wanted to say that I use indieshuffle a lot, and I love it. I have it open when I'm at work, and I have the app when I'm driving.

I wish the Chrome app was better, or if it had a standalone client wrapped in Electron or something.

[jason-grishkoff]

I'm in the process of rebuilding the Android and iPhone apps from scratch using React Native. It's coming along really quickly :)

[copperx]

Stupid question: any particular reasons you picked Meteor and React? Also, can you give us details on the backend/infrastructure?

Thanks!

[jason-grishkoff]

Because it seemed cool. I think I'd seen it pop up on HckrNews and Reddit a few times, so I wanted to give it a whirl.

The stack is something along the lines of: nginx + docker + Meteor (node/mongodb) + React.

[asenna]

+1 for Meteor.

I'm pretty sure Jason uses Mupx for deployment to DigitalOcean (https://github.com/arunoda/meteor-up/tree/mupx).

For anyone interested, this package makes it super easy to setup all the tools and deploy to the servers (almost as easy as pushing to Heroku!).

I've had good experience in scaling using Mupx and Cluster (another package from the same team - https://github.com/meteorhacks/cluster)

[b0ner_t0ner]

Thought it was meteor hanging (never seen it scale properly), but there are bugs on your FAQ page (duplicate IDs/anchors).

[alcuadrado]

As an Indie Shuffle user, I feel happy for you!

[krisgenre]

How much does it cost you to run the service?

[jason-grishkoff]

It's pretty minimal. The most expensive component is usually technical development, and given that I do all that myself... well, that's a big "cost saving" :)