Update: Dec. 12th

As mentioned in the forums, our little project is a bit different than most of the ones here, but we're still gaining a TON from following the very same process outlined in the course overview.

The most amazing part of proactively going through the effort to discover who our audience is (to the extent of watching over the shoulder of individual people/strangers as they check out BEASTMODE.FM for the first time) is how easily that exercise serves to DEMOLISH some pretty stupid assumptions we initially made about what our audience truly wanted and/or liked. Definitely check out my response to John Storey in the comments below for an example of one of those assumptions...

Otherwise, I want to pass along to this group a super-useful "audience/user learning" tool that we just found out about and ending up using a lot: it's called Criticue (http://www.criticue.com/) and if you're building any sort of website/app/whatever I think I'd definitely recommend going on there and getting (by reciprocation) feedback from a few really thoughtful first-time users.

Cheers,
Matthias "aka DJ BEASTMODE"
@galica

Addendum1: Complete strangers finding out about BEASTMODE.FM via a friend, using it, and loving it so much initially that they tweet wild & crazy stuff like this: https://twitter.com/sammantic/status/276754033203638273 I honestly don't even know what to do with that right now, lol. I guess we'll see if that feeling lasts for those people :)

Addendum2: Copy/pasting here my team's email exchange about our experience using Criticue (courtesy of @ben_pink):

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Matthias Galica
Date: Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 5:46 AM
Subject: Re: Criticue

+1 on this being a de facto $$-free user acquisition channel.

Even if you subsequently can't buy immediate scale/reach like Apptopia et al like to tease, I honestly think this sort of feedback on whether your product is worth a damn is a helluva lot more valuable to start. (To the extent before it becomes circle-jerk, naturally.)

Nice find.

On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 4:11 AM, Romy Maxwell wrote:

Hahah, I could have fun w/ this.
Also occurs to me that this is basically a near-free user acquisition channel.

On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 11:12 AM, Ben Pinkerton wrote:

Some more. Considering the duplicated BEASTMODE.FM and color usage on listen and sign up btns as valid items. Mostly because it'd crossed my mind before and everyone knows it's only a good idea if I thought of it first.

I'm all reviewed-out so the circle-jerk is over for now.

Love the URL. Nice clean site. Can't really think of anything that could be better.

Review time: 163 s

I like the clean, simple look. Seems very easy to navigate.

Review time: 23 s

Like the fact that you rely on images and don't have a lot of text.

Review time: 60 s

Very "easy" design, i.e it looks clean and serves the purpose perfectly. Listening to a genre was easy too, without any pestering registration process or messages to join this-or-that. All in all, a good design that serves it's purpose quite well! (PS: Why not add "Neo-Folk" to the genre?)

Review time: 167 s

Great job, extremely clear headline. I get immediately what you do. Make this even bigger and whz not a more friendly font? Why are you repeating thwat you are Beastmode.fm if the logo is right above? Also, the sub-headline is clear about your difference system and makes me want to act. The call to action is clear. The visual looks not clear and I would rework it... The genres below are quite distracting - IF your objective is to get people to click 'start listening'.

Review time: 265 s

I love the clean design. I would consider doing some CRO. Test the "Start Listening" button (different colors, sizes, etc). I would also consider making the "Sign in" button a different color than the CTA button.

On 11 December 2012 17:38, Ben Pinkerton wrote:

Some more.
#2 knows what's up.

Good fun this, something cathartic about giving feedback on other peoples work. Some real crap out there as well.

[REDACTED user/pass] if you want to try it out and get more reviews on the BM. Hit the Get Review button to review a site which gets BM queued for a review.

------------

Initial description/stuffs

Me and my team just started hacking together a passion project on the side called BEASTMODE.FM, because we wanted to make a really simple music discovery experience. Specifically one that caters to an audience seeking new music for life, love, stress and setbacks, and for those trying to breathe.

Because it's never truly labor whenever it's true love, we conceived and delivered this basically just to try and bring a little more joy into the world.

Here's the 'proper' tagline we've given this project:

Activate BEASTMODE to hear the hottest new tracks within seconds of their appearance on top music blogs. All for free in the genres you love. Any device, every device, at http://beastmode.fm/

Matthias Galica

emcee at BEASTMODE.FM

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