Studio Search

I just developed a new feature for my website. It is a Google Maps application that let musicians search a rehearsal and recording studios based on certain conditions like price range and location. Its feature is still limited to Tokyo area but I am planning to add more studios and expand it to all over Japan.

There are 2 reasons I've added the new feature. First, the customer segment is the same as my main business. My website customers being musicians, I thought it might help my main business if the new feature brings more traffic to the website. It's kind of a marketing strategy, but there are a lot of musicians looking for studios to rehearse or do recording, so I might as well offer a solution and be able to increase the site traffic.

The second reason is that I wanted to try my old business idea. I thought of different business ideas in the past, and this studio search was one of them. I didn't go for that idea because I thought I'd better stick to one idea and chose my current business model instead. But if the customer segment is the same, maybe it's not such a bad idea to offer two services instead of one. It's an experiment, but I guess I will find out in a few months.

The best part is that it doesn't cost me much money or time to experiment and bring out a new feature. Once it took me about 6 months to develop the first service since I didn't even know basic html, but now I got hang of some basic programing, it only took me about 10 days from the idea conception to implementation. Not bad. Kudos to Google Maps API and open source community!