With consumer tech startups particularly, it's oftentimes simply a matter of the public being "ready" for a particular idea. Facebook was far from the first social network; I was using LiveJournal in 2002, sites like EZBoard and Xanga came out around 1999, and before then there were all sorts of hosted forums like UBB (and UseNet, of course). But what made Facebook special was that they launched in a place (Harvard) and time (2004) that was ready for them, and then expanded quickly across the world. Their tech was trivial at the time; I could've coded up Facebook as it existed in Sept 2004 (when I discovered it) in a couple of weeks. But I wasn't the one who actually did it and got people to use it.
Would be interesting to see some data on RapGenius userbase in industry standard terms - monthly actives, daily actives, etc.
- there's a large community aspect to it. large community of editors who analyze lyrics and discussions
- strong reputation within the hip hop community, a ton of artists will describe what certain lyrics mean and what their inspiration was for the song. It's a big way for artists to connect to their fans and it's used by a lot
- The preferred lyrics site for hip hop fans. Instead of searching through google and getting a top hit, people go to rapgenius and search. They're trying to be THE source for lyrics and annotations, not just a source you randomly find
- they're trying to expand this to other genres (rock, poetry, literature, etc.). they've had some success but being so tied to rapgenius hurt them (rock.rapgenius.com before, rock.genius.com now)
It's amazing how many startups you could insert there.
- there's a large community aspect to it. large community of editors who analyze lyrics and discussions
- strong reputation within the hip hop community, a ton of artists will describe what certain lyrics mean and what their inspiration was for the song. It's a big way for artists to connect to their fans and it's used by a lot
- The preferred lyrics site for hip hop fans. Instead of searching through google and getting a top hit, people go to rapgenius and search. They're trying to be THE source for lyrics and annotations, not just a source you randomly find
- they're trying to expand this to other genres (rock, poetry, literature, etc.). they've had some success but being so tied to rapgenius hurt them (rock.rapgenius.com before, rock.genius.com now)
It's so valuable because they figured out how to gain traction and build a large community, it's not a lot more complicated than that. Now they're going to attempt to leverage that into everything else that can be annotated. Combining all of that in one location = worth a few billion dollars potentially, at least in this inflated market.
They built a slightly better mouse trap, or at a minimum got the mice to come to their mouse trap instead of other mouse traps (most lyrics sites are terrible).
For most consumer sites, the technology is far easier than acquiring the users and a community that meets a certain quality standard. These days the technology part is really easy in fact.