How To Launch a Music Startup: Establishing Key Metrics

How To Launch a Music Startup: Establishing Key Metrics

This post is part of the How To Launch a Music Startup series by Brenden Mulligan, which focuses on building a company that creates online products for musicians. Mulligan founded ArtistData, which was recently acquired by Sonicbids, and can be found on Twitter at @bmull.

Before starting this series off, I thought it'd be useful to lay out some fundamental truths I believe exist which have an enormous effect on the potential success of building a product to sell to artists. I wanted to bring this up immediately because I thought getting the conversation going in the comments now would influence how the rest of the series is laid out.

There are three metrics of a business's foundation/plan that investors like to know when looking at a potential return on investment: market size, willingness to pay, and exit potential. These are important to think about beforehand because they're generally tangible and based off of known numbers or historical performance. The quick overview:

• MARKET SIZE: How many musicians are there? Of these, which are relevant (potential customers?). This number is incredibly important to establish up front, because it shows you how big your customer base can be, which helps you make the decision of whether investing in building a product for them is worth it.

• WILLINGNESS TO PAY: What is the likelihood the market you are targeting is willing to open their wallets and hand you money. If they are willing to pay, how much? Are these $2/month customers or $200/month customers? If it varies, what percentage are willing to pay a lot vs. a little? This number is important because combined with the Market Size metric, it will show you how much revenue you can expect to generate if you do your job right.

• EXIT POTENTIAL: How will your shareholders get their money back? If you don't plan on getting investors, this means what's your end game? Are you going to build a business to run for the rest of your life and pay yourself a comfortable salary (investors wont give you money for this) or do you want to sell for hundreds of millions of dollars to Google? This is based on a number of factors, but one great place to look is historical exits from other companies in your market.

So that's the first part of this series. Regardless of your company, if you are building a product for bands to pay for, everyone's answers to these areas will be similar. As we unveil these answers, hopefully people who are interested in starting an artist focused business or raising money for one will have some research done for them.

from:

http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2010/08/how-to-launch-a-music-startup-establishing-key-metrics.html#

Leverage Points

1. Jelaskan konsep "leverage points" atau titik ungkit dalam konteks berpikir sistem, dan kenapa walaupun konsep ini tidak baru dalam berpikir sistem memiliki makna baru?

Leverage points adalah suatu titik dari sebuah proses yang mana jika pada titik tersebut dilakukan perubahan, meskipun kecil, maka perubahan tersebut akan mengakibatkan perubahan besar pada keseluruhan system.

Leverage points merupakan konsep lama tetap karena kebanyakan orang menentukan suatu titik ungkit dengan menggunakan intuisi sehingga menentukan leverage points adalah hal yang baru bagi berpikir system. Selain itu juga karena pada dasarnya belum tentu kita bisa mendapatkan titik ungkit dalam sebuah system, terutama pada system yang besar, namun demikian kita masih bisa mencari dimana titik ungkit itu berada. Keberadaan inilah yang bisa kita analisis sehingga kita dapat melakukan perbaikan dalam sebuah system.

2. Sebutkan 12 titik leverage points versi buku thinking in systems?

1. Numbers—Constants and parameters such as subsidies, taxes, standards

2. Buffers—The sizes of stabilizing stocks relative to their flows

3. Stock-and-Flow Structures—Physical systems and their nodes of intersection

4. Delays—The lengths of time relative to the rates of system changes

5. Balancing Feedback Loops—The strength of the feedbacks relative to the impacts they are trying to correct

6. Reinforcing Feedback Loops—The strength of the gain of driving loops

7. Information Flows—The structure of who does and does not have access to information

8. Rules—Incentives, punishments, constraints

9. Self-Organization—The power to add, change, or evolve system structure

10. Goals—The purpose or function of the system

11. Paradigms—The mind-set out of which the system—its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters—arises

12. Transcending Paradigms

3. Bahasa sebagai sarana berkomunikasi harus digunakan secara hati-hati, jelaskan konsep ini dalam berpikir system?

Beberapa orang di dunia ini menggunakan bahasa yang berbeda. Hal ini adalah karena mereka tinggal di tempat yang berbeda. Orang Eskimo akan memiliki beberapa kata ‘salju’, hal ini dikarenakan mereka menggunakan salju dalam beberapa hal sesuai konteksnya. Untuk itu orang Eskimo harus memilah kata yang tepat untuk menjelaskan kata salju sesuai konteksnya agar orang lain mengerti apa yang dimaksud akan salju yang sebenarnya. Begitu pula dalam sebuah system, tidak semua orang menggunakan istilah yang sama dalam system. Jika kita menggunakan kata yang salah, maka orang lain mungkin akan salah mengartika. Hal ini akan membuat orang tersebut melakukan hal yang tidak seharusnya ada dalam system. Sehingga kesalahannya mungkin akan berakibat gagalnya system tersebut.

Strategic Management

Strategic Management

• The Importance of Strategic Management

• The set of managerial decisions and actions that determines the long-run performance of an organization.

• It results in higher organizational performance.

• It requires that managers examine and adapt to business environment changes.

• It coordinates diverse organizational units, helping them focus on organizational goals.

• It is very much involved in the managerial decision-making process.

• The Strategic Management Process

• Step 1: Identifying the organization’s current mission, objectives, and strategies

• Step 2: Conducting an external analysis (custom, market, techno, product, image)

• Step 3: Conducting an internal analysis (strenght, weakness)

• Step 4: Formulating strategies (alternatives, chose, mactch, correct it)

• Step 5: Implementing strategies

• Step 6: Evaluating Results

• Types of Organizational Strategies

• Tthree growth strategies (Growth - expansion, Stability - maintenance, renewal – new markets)

• Discuss the BCG matrix and how it’s used. Cash cows: low growth rate, high market share Stars: high growth rate, high market share Question marks: high growth rate, low market share Dogs: low growth rate, low market share

• Define SBUs and business-level strategies. A strategy that seeks to determine how an organization should compete in each of its SBUs (strategic business units).

• Competitive advantage in business-level strategies. Differentiates the firm from its competitors Can create a sustainable competitive advantage. Represents the company’s focus on quality management to achieve continuous improvement and meet customers’ demand for quality.

• Explain Porter’s five forces model. Threat of New Entrants, Threat of Substitutes, Bargaining Power of Buyers, Bargaining Power of Suppliers, Current Rivalry.

• Describe three generic competitive strategies. Cost Leadership Strategy, Differentiation Strategy, Focus Strategy

Organization

Organisasi

• Defining Organizational Structure

• Discuss the traditional (The formal arrangement of jobs within an organization) and contemporary view of work specialization (The degree to which tasks in the organization are divided into separate jobs with each step completed by a different person).

• Describe each of the five forms of departmentalization. Functional (hrd, produksi, enginering) Product (industri, rail, diesel, logistic) Geographic (bandung, jkt) Process (sewing, planing, assembling, finishing) Customer (retail, wholesaler, government)

• Discuss the traditional and contemporary views of chain of command The continuous line of authority that extends from upper levels of an organization to the lowest levels of the organization and clarifies who reports to who.

• Discuss the traditional and contemporary views of span of control. The number of employees who can be effectively and efficiently supervised by a manager, graicunas.

• Organizational Design Decisions

• Contrast mechanistic and organic organizations.

• Explain the relationship between strategy and structure.

• Tell how organizational size affects organizational design.

• Discuss Woodward’s findings on the relationship of technology and structure.

• Explain how environmental uncertainty affects organizational design.

• Common Organizational Designs

• Contrast the three traditional organizational designs.

• Explain team-based, matrix, and project structures.

• Discuss the design of virtual, network, and modular organizations.

• Describe the characteristics of a learning organization.