My first product: Vibecast - The website builder for DJs
I've spent several years building a service called Vibecast, a website builder designed for DJs to create an online profile in minutes without any technical or design knowledge.
Vibecast is a service I wanted myself while DJing throughout my 20s and always presumed someone would have built it. But they never did.
I first took on the idea five years ago, and what I thought would have been a relatively simple project turned out to be quite a lot more complicated than I imagined.
Vibecast has been planned, prototyped, designed, (95%) developed, tested and deployed from the ground up by myself without funding, while freelancing and learning as I've gone along.
I'm pleased to say after several years, Vibecast is ready!
Over the last few months, I've been working alongside DJs testing Vibecast in the real world with exceptionally positive feedback. Since launching the website https://www.vibecast.com last week, nearly 400 DJs have signed-up for Early Access.
Vibecast is a 100% bootstrapped project.
Jack.
Excellent job on your site! If I were an employer looking for a web designer, I would hire you in a split second! But I am a humble beginner, and I found your deconstruction of the tools you used for each piece very instructive. Thanks for that!
Veering off topic, I would love a music site that offered a paid subscription service like ye olde Columbia Music clubs of my parents youth. You web savvy DJs could do the legwork and curate music based on the subscribers taste. You would send it to us in our desired format – CDs, vinyl, digital. You could also introduce us to new sounds.
There’s a lot of people who do not enjoy the whole music download/streaming world of today. As a result, our music collections have stagnated. For me, listening to music is (was) my time to be completely disconnected from the internet and phones. Now, updating my music collection is too much like work.
I would say there's a market for something like that. Traditional ways of listening to music are coming back. I wouldn't know how to execute it though. Good idea.
Congratulations, and my compliments for the design! I've been in this field for years, so I've a curiosity: How how is this different or better than Resident Advisor for example?
Good luck and keep us posted! :)
Thank you. Resident Advisor is a news and information site with a tiny bit of social media (events, tickets, etc.) Vibecast is a website builder for DJs.
Got it! Thank you for the clarification :)
Hi Jack!
Great work! Really like the design, product looks pretty mature already for a fist launch :)
I am actually working on a similar project myself (not focused on DJs, more on musicians), but not even close to where you are haha. So don't have too much feedback. The only thing I can say is you should raise your price (in my opinion). From my research, artists are willing to pay €200 p/y easily. They now pay €18 p/m for their useless (mostly cause of bad templates) SquareSpace account! That nearly tripples your price. Also, why give a 3 months free on top of the 14 day trial?
400 early access sign ups sounds great! Can you share something how you grew those?
Good luck man, I'll follow your process with interest :)
Thanks for the feedback.
The current price is Early Access (no free beta). Anyone who signs up now will stay that price once I've finished the billing system forever, as a thank you. Once I'm happy the product is ready (out of Early Access), the price will increase for new sign-ups to $12/pm or $120/py.
I'll be honest, I've done well from Facebook ads. I realised DJs don't know this type of service even exists and word-of-mouth wasn't getting much traction. As soon as did targeting adverts I've been inundated. I've got the ROI down to around $4 for each new user that registers. I would say approximately 200 came from Facebook ads.
Stay in touch, Joep. I'm keen to hear you get on too :)
Wow, very nice and polished. It goes against the whole minimum viable (and even lovable) product mindset. At what point, if ever, did you feel confident that there’s enough of a market to spend this much time making it?
I guess it’s a bit about love for the project and community that’s been driving you more than knowing there’s a market... but have you not brought anyone on and taken money before? If not, why?
I’ve sunk almost two years into my own project (automation of admin stuff for improv companies and similar businesses). I’ve learned a lot, and I think I understand their problem well enough now to make something 5-10x better than what they currently use (which most often is paying someone to do the repetitive tasks). I still feel like I haven’t “validated” well enough, so it’s interesting for me to hear how you’ve regarded your own long-running project.
Thanks, Marcus.
Vibeast is a service I wanted myself and nearly all my DJs friends too (and I know a lot of DJs). Also, I started this project to become better at building web applications. Over the years I developed it and shown it to various DJs, and the feedback is always positive.
I've always wanted to improve my all-rounder skills of being able to design and develop and everything else that goes with getting a product on the web, so I took on this project myself.
I've never wanted any investment, and I believe I can get this profitable on my own. I'm personally down around £15k, and although not ideal it's trickled in over several years of developing it and entirely manageable. If the plan fails, I can take on more freelance work.
I did some validation, but this project is unique as there are several reasons for building it and putting it out to market is only one of them.
Best of luck to you. Oh, and I meant take money as in charge for the service from customers wanting to use it. Not bringing on investors. :)
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Hi Jack,
Congratulations. The site looks cool. You have a good amount of people signed up for early access -- this is a great sign.
What tech stack did you choose for vibecast?
Regards,
Shouvik
I chose to build Vibecast as microservices as much as I could. There are four separate codebases for the whole platform.
Design & Extras:
Learning (most useful ones):
I'll write up full blog posts on building Vibecast and all the different stages I took once it's out in the wild :)
Love this breakdown thanks! Makes me realise how far out of my depth I am considering building a website builder :)
Please, don't be overwhelmed by that stack. It could have quickly easily have been built on single Laravel (or Rails, .NET, node, etc) application. I chose to overengineer it as I wanted to learn my craft.
This sounds like a cool idea and haven't come across anything exactly made like this before.
I'm curious as to what your demographic buildup is like for your current customer base. Would you say it is mostly club/bar DJs or mostly mobile DJs? I know that each type has a somewhat different business model, and music selection that needs to be adjusted differently towards a different crowd. For instance, mobile DJs play to more general audiences, are more accepting of song requests, but a club DJ has a bit more leeway when "feeling" a specific audience, venues for a more particular demographic and usually complement other sets. Do you think your website will be able to improve the business needs of both?
Hello.
I'm not focusing too much on the types of DJ, but on DJs in general. Vibecast can cater to anyone within music and some other creative industries also. Concentrating on DJs is enough targeting for me, for now.
I've personally had a career playing house/techno/tech-house/etc around London/UK/European clubs in the late 2000's so I have a lot of friends and contacts who are similar in styles and tastes.
However, the Vibecast Facebook page likes and stats suggest my biggest market will be RnB/commercial DJs in the U.S. which makes sense.
Until I have enough income to focus more in-depth on types of DJs, I'm focusing on all DJs.
Of course, there will always be bias to house DJs as you probably seen from the demo sites it's all made up of mostly house mixes, events, clubs, videos from people I know.
Hope that helps :)