JonathanMelhuish.com

It’s been a fun ride but now it’s officially over - I’ve decided to call it a day on the Flukebox project. To be honest, I’ve made little progress over the last few months but the final nails in the coffin were provided by IndabaMusic. They’ve not been around long, but they’ve already created a slick web site with many of the key features that the Flukebox musician community was going to have. With competitors this good, I think it’s time to find a different problem to solve.

It’s often said that you learn more from failure than from success, and for sure, this project has taught me a lot. Most fundamentally, it has taught me several important things about myself that perhaps I knew but was trying hard to ignore:

• I prefer to pick a hard problem and spend all day thinking about it than to pick a easier problem and actually solve it. Instead, I should try harder to do something productive without worrying too much about the details or in which order I should complete things.
• I need to work with other people who are less imaginative but more productive. Not just so that I can sit in my chair and bark orders, but that that my team-mates can periodically encourage me to stop dreaming and do something useful for a change.
• Apart from occasional toilet and meal breaks, I really can surf the internet for an infinite period of time. Having regular contact with other humans, especially those that ask you “what have you done today?” helps a lot, but ultimately I need to recognise my knowledge addiction and keep it under control.

With that in mind, it’s not surprising that as my team fell apart, so did the project. Although I succeeded in finding some great people with the right skills and a genuine interest in the project, they all had successful businesses of their own as well as full-time study. I knew that it would be a problem from the beginning, but I had hoped that I might be able to persuade them to give me just enough time to make it work. As it turns out, I was being over-optimistic. In retrospect, I should have tried much harder to find team members with time as well as ability, instead of trying to “go it alone” with inevitable consequences.

It’s not all doom and gloom, though - many things have gone surprisingly well:

• Almost everyone I’ve talked to about my ideas have been very helpful, supportive and sometimes even constructively critical
• Being given funding from my University to “be entrepreneurial” was a pleasant surprise!
• Moving to Poland. Not only has it been a lot of fun living here, it’s given me a lot of confidence that I can live a semi-nomadic lifestyle without problems. I mean, if I can live in a country where even “hi” (cześć) is unpronounceable, the deputy education minister thinks that “the theory of evolution is a lie” and government officials are worried about school teachers and even the Teletubbies promoting homosexuality, I can live anywhere

Thanks to everyone who gave me their support and good luck to the IndabaMusic crew - it’d be great to see them grow rapidly and vindicate my ideas! I feel I’ve learnt a lot and am much better equipped to start my next businesses. Watch this space.

“A Minnow on a Mission” - that’s a mighty odd title for a blog about the environment and vegetarian cooking, you’re probably thinking. Actually, the original intention was to blog about the online music community we’re starting, Flukebox. But as I have a habit of doing, I got distracted by all manner of other things.

That’s not to suggest that nothing’s been happening in Flukebox land. A little while back, Last.fm’s added two of our key features, downloads and concert listings, to their service. Then one of most enthusiastic and knowledgeable supporters, Andrew Dubber, wrote a blog post that wished our service a “swift and inexpensive failure” - with the smallest of get-out clauses in case I started crying. These, and a few developments from other competitors, made me increasingly worried that perhaps we risked being a small fish in an overcrowded pond. A quick look at some of the biggest Internet success stories in recent years (Amazon, eBay, Skype, etc.) shows that not only did they do something well, they also got established before anyone else had come up with something worth using. So, after a week of feeling decidedly moody and angrily throwing lots of ideas in the bin, I’ve emerged with a new plan.

Flukebox was always a reaction to two technologically-driven trends:

• the reducing cost of digital recording technologies are encouraging more people to record high-quality music
• the Internet is making it practically free to distribute music and is changing patterns and methods of consumption

Just like everybody else, we were focusing mainly on the latter trend and just accepting that the first would provide the raw material for our service. But why? Many musicians make music for the fun of it and don’t really care if anybody hears it or not. A bit like the way I write this blog as a way of getting my thoughts straight and keeping a diary, and am pleasantly surprised when I find somebody has actually read it.

A quick and informal survey reveals that people are mostly just using email and discussion forums to collaborate with other musicians online - if at all. Surely we can do better than that? Making music is different in several important ways - so why do we basically only have tools for doing it on a single computer? Why is there no proper online community for musicians?
Why indeed.

As I’m living in Poland and the rest of my team are currently in various parts of the U.K., we naturally rely quite heavily on telecommunications technologies. Of course, we use email for most non-urgent communication and SMS for more pressing issues, such as organising conference calls. But here’s a trio of technologies that perhaps you’re not making full use of already:

• Skype - I know plenty of people already use Skype to call their long-lost relatives on the other side of the world, but it’s actually pretty good for business, too. Although there are occasional issues with call quality, it’s very useful to be able to send files and web addresses to each other during the conversation. And setting up a conference call is as easy as clicking a few buttons - much easier than trying to figure out how to do that on a normal telephone.
• Google Docs - you might not see the point in struggling with the sometimes slightly awkward interface when you’ve got a perfectly good office suite on your desktop. The real reason to persevere is that Google Docs makes it really easy to work on documents together - even at exactly the same time. For instance, we can keep notes or jot ideas whilst in a Skype conference, and everyone sees what we’ve written. So no arguments about who said they’d do what!
• Gliffy - sadly Gliffy’s updating isn’t so fast, so things can get a bit confusing when more than one person is working on a document at the same time. But it’s still a great way to generate diagrams together.

Of course, none of these technologies cope with the fact that it’s very easy for people to go incommunicado - after all, you won’t bump into them in the corridor. I think remote-controlled electric-shock collars are the best solution…