Launch HN: Laylo (YC S20) – Fan reminders for content, merchandise, and events

[amellin794]

Alec and Sajan here, co-founders of Laylo (cal.laylo.com), a platform for content creators to offer one-click reminders to their upcoming content, events and merchandise.

To give some backstory, over the last year we were building a data startup to help musicians understand who their biggest fans are online. We partnered with Sony Music and have over 600,000 artists accessing their fan data through our API. One thing we constantly noticed was that artists were posting on Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, etc. about their upcoming releases. The problem was that since their releases weren’t out yet, they didn’t have any destination to send fans.

Posts like “new merch dropping next Tuesday at 3 PST” assumes that fans will actually remember. It also uses up valuable social media real estate and doesn’t give the artist any usable data.

That’s why we built Laylo Drops. Drops lets you create a landing page for your upcoming releases, captures your fan data (emails and phone numbers), and automatically reminds them at the time of the drop.

Drops links are sharable anywhere that you can put a link: IG Stories, Twitter, etc. Fans don’t even need to create an account to RSVP. We also provide social media templates, custom messaging tools and more to make the marketing simple.

We set our sights on the music industry (because that’s where we started) but ultimately our goal is to help creators of all kinds connect directly with their audience and make announcements with ease.

We would love to hear your feedback and your experiences as creators or working with creators. We’re very excited to be sharing this with HN, and we’ll be here to answer any and all questions you want to throw our way!

Thanks,

Alec

[frankdenbow]

Been ideating on this for a long time, it's great to see you put together a platform that captures this deep inefficiency in the market. I would say to go after youtubers as brands like Gymshark did, the music space will always make it difficult for you to extract value for your company if you're touching major label content. Congrats on launch!

[amellin794]

Appreciate the advice. We’re working to get to more YouTubers and Gamers for the exact reason you mentioned. If you know anyone in the space send them our way!

[instakill]

hit up the AOE2 community - t90official, MembTV, Nili etc.

[halgir]

Congrats, this looks really slick.

My one big worry for this is that you might have built a company around something that might as well be a single feature for someone else with an existing foothold in the industry.

For example, most larger labels use Linkfire to manage smart links, pre saves, bio links, etc. There are other companies with similar offerings. This seems like an obvious addition to a suite like that. Have you considered the defensibility of your product if your one feature is incorporated into a tool that many potential users are already familiar with and use daily?

Your intention to be industry-agnostic does partially mitigate this. Also I imagine you'd build your own suite with additional features if you get a foothold with this one.

Disclosure: I work at Linkfire, so don't reply with anything you wouldn't want a potential competitor to know.

Edit: I just realized that this actually is just one feature of a larger offering. Looks great!

[amellin794]

Thanks! Linkfire is definitely an inspiration for us and our goal is to build a suite of tools for fan identification, monetization, and communication.

We hope that by building for a wide array of creators and continuing to expand the toolset we can differentiate ourselves from some of the established products.

[aviditas]

This would be great for prepping a fan base for a Kickstarter (or the like). I recently have had frustration with wanting a reminder for a product release on Kickstarter but all the company is doing is a single static page. Get your stuff together status audio. It won't stop me from checking for the drop regularly but I am an enthusiast about their products. I'd think that this could be helpful for web comic artists for new merch drops and similar crowd fund campaigns. I know that it would be great from the fan's perspective at least.

[amellin794]

This is an awesome idea we hadn't thought of. What was the product? We'll reach out to the team!

[aviditas]

Status Audio, I have about one of everything they've made so far. https://www.status.co/pages/between-lp2 The page does have a subscribe option on the desktop page (I rarely check my email via computer these days). But yes, there are a ton of artists that need to gauge interest and track notices out to their fans. They make a good amount of their money via merch versus ads. Webtoons handles their signed artists but there are a ton of the unsigned ones that rely on patron and etsy for income. Is there a way to link through articles about the artist/product to the sign up or have an embedded option on a third party's page?

[100-xyz]

Hey nice to see your product develop. I think Joan Jett uses this.

[amellin794]

Thanks!

[vthallam]

Sounds like a great product that could be very useful.

> Drops lets you create a landing page for your upcoming releases

Why should they(content creators) not just use their existing website to capture data and send every time they drop something new?

[amellin794]

Thanks!

After talking to a ton of creators, we found that most of them don’t have or maintain a website so they wanted a simple solution. We’ve also built in the notification, marketing and messaging tools so that there’s very little work on the creator side.

We do have some requests for an embedable widget which is definitely on our list for upcoming features.

[Disruptive_Dave]

Landing pages that display links to multiple music streaming/purchase/play sites are extremely common nowadays. Pretty much every music distributor offers them. Example: https://distrokid.com/willsmith

[amellin794]

Yep we’re not competing with multiple link tools / presaves. We’re focused on the marketing and notification side. For a creator those tools don’t help your fans actually remember your future content they only link out to the content once it’s available.

[saaaaaam]

Because most content creators do not have the time or technical ability to do this.

[laserpistus]

This can work for non-music drops as well. Will test it for our weekly web developer challenge at scrimba.

[amellin794]

That's an awesome idea, can't wait to hear how that goes!

[i_like_pie]

congrats on shipping and def a problem worth solving (reminders for creators on interaction points/commitments to fans)

at streamlabs we built and shut down many products for creators and we'd frequently hit that issue

[amellin794]

Thanks and would love to hear more! We’re just getting started and it would be great to see what issues we could solved for you

[saaaaaam]

This is really interesting. Where are you based?

[amellin794]

Thanks! We’re all based in LA (unfortunately remotely for the time being)

[saaaaaam]

Drop me an email? [e-mail]

[benburton]

Great stuff guys!

[amellin794]

Thanks Ben!