Wednesday, August 20, 2008

My website (Audia) is up.

My website is now officially up and running. To summarize what my website does, Audia is a website for musicians where they can upload their promotion materials and submit to promoters and concert organizers. Musicians can use a template to create promotion kits and make galleries and audio playlists. The website is in Japanese, but please take a look anyway.

It took me more time than expected to complete the website, but for a non-techy like me, it has been a great learning experience putting up a website together and understanding the underlying technology. Of course I could've outsourced it, but for me to become a web-entrepreneur, I think the learning process was both necessary and worth the effort.

Now the real challenge will be marketing the website and generating revenue. Notwithstanding my previous statement, anybody can put up a website if you spend enough time on it. But whether your service can find customers in the market and become a profitable business is another story. I hope MBA education I received at Babson will assist me along the way (otherwise why the heck should I spend so much money on tuition?).

2 comments:

Narayanan said...

Kohei: Congrats. I checked (rather looked) out your Japanese site. What is your segment size? I am curious if there are many Japanese reading musicians to come to your site. How about having an English version of your website. That brings up another interesting topic. What is a good way to create/maintain multi lingual website?

If you have not accessed, checkout Hubspot.com's Inbound marketing blog. You may find useful tips to bring traffic.

Kohei said...

@narayanan
I estimate my target segment to be 100-200k musicians. A multi-language website is an interesting topic, and I have been tempted to implement it more than several times. I don't think it's technically hard to create one. You can use a subdomain like en.example.com, or program your website so that the same exact url returns different contents depending on the visitor' browser language setting or IP address.

But IMO the problem is rather marketing. It costs me a lot of resources, both time and money-wise, to target both Japanese and English speaking customers. I will need different ads, different media, etc, for each country. Perhaps I can expand to other countries once my business becomes profitable in Japan.